How to Speak Up When You Feel Awkward—and Build Trust with Henna Pryor

0:00 You know that moment when you have something to say in a meeting but you start doing the math in your head? What if it comes out wrong? What if everyone looks at me? So you say nothing at all. We've all been there. Welcome to Loud and Lifted. I'm Betsy Hamm. And my guest today is Henna Pryor. Henna is a workplace performance expert, executive coach, and keynote speaker who helps people take bigger risks and communicate more effectively at work. She's also the author of Good Awkward and her new book, The Signal Gap. Hanna has a take on awkwardness that I haven't heard before. So we get into that and we also talk about how to get through those moments instead of letting them make our decisions for us. Then we get into the question at the heart of her new book. Once you do speak up, is your message landing the way you think it is? And let me tell you, one of her examples made me rethink a very common work email. So let's get into it. Welcome to Loud and Lifted. Henna, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. I feel like we've been dancing around each other all summer, so I'm glad we finally did it. I know.

1:06 I'm so excited for this conversation. And you've been busy, which we're going to get into why you have been extra busy. But this is a great topic that I know is definitely going to resonate with our listeners, because we're going to use one of my favorite words. We're just going to actually start with is the word. awkward. And you talk about awkward being a good thing. And, you know, on this podcast, we have talked a lot about confidence and getting the reps in and growing and all those sort of buzzwords, right, that we hear a lot. But you come at this from a different angle. So let's start with, like, the basic of the definition. Like, what is good awkward? Yeah. So let me actually start by defining the word awkward, because I think sometimes people hear about this and they're like, Oh, are we talking about get comfortable getting uncomfortable?

1:47 It is much more specific than that. So what is the emotion of awkwardness? It is a social emotion of discomfort. So, yes, there is discomfort, but it is a social emotion, meaning you don't feel awkward typically when you're by yourself. You mispronounce somebody's name, you trip over your own two feet, but you're home alone. You might be like silly me, but you don't typically feel overcome by awkwardness. It happens in social settings. So some of the cousins in this world are awkwardness, embarrassment, cringe, as the teenagers like to say. These are emotions that happen in social settings. The other thing that I want to emphasize around this word is that it is an emotion. Awkwardness by definition is an emotion. And in some grammatical uses, it's an adjective. But it is not a definitive and objective state, meaning when someone says, I am awkward, there is no such thing as a factually awkward person. You are choosing to define yourself as such. So what you're actually saying in so many words is I feel incredibly awkward often, right? I feel awkward with some level of frequency, but that's a huge distinction to make early on because it is not a permanent trait. it is a transient state. And just by reframing that in our minds, it can make it a little bit easier to get through it. So short answer to what is good awkward. Bad awkward is when we let that emotion get the best of us, right? Where we don't

3:18 take risks, we don't open our mouth, we don't raise our hand, we don't ask for the raise, we don't put ourselves out there. Good awkward. means understanding that this emotion is universal. It is something that is going to be frequent if change is going to be part of the equation with hello, look around. It's not going anywhere. If you plan to have any transitions in your life, if you plan to reach for goals, if you plan to do anything worth a dang, you need to get good at this emotion. And that is where we start talking about good awkward. I love that definition. I've never heard it positioned that way. And you're right. We'll be like, oh, I'm so awkward. Maybe it's in a social setting or whatever. But I love that definition. And it's good to feel awkward because you're uncomfortable. And I don't know, uncomfortable is almost overused, right? We're uncomfortable with a lot of things. And sometimes you avoid being uncomfortable, rightfully so.

4:07 And sometimes you should lean into it. So I like that perspective. So let's talk about some of those times when people do feel cringy or that good awkward and it's good. It's okay. Yeah. I think, you know, ultimately there's two formats that it takes. The one is in moments that are completely unexpected. So you're walking down the sidewalk, you trip over your own two feet. You weren't exactly planning that, right? So that becomes a moment of, oh boy, I'm embarrassed because The social norm is that I should know how to walk down the street. I accidentally violated a social norm, right? The emotion of awkwardness has a lot to do with what we deem social norms. The other version, and I think where it would be useful to spend time for your community, is those planned moments of I'm going to try something.

4:52 I'm going to take a risk. I'm going to put my hand up. And I don't quite know how it's going to be received. It's in those moments that we can especially work on our conditioning, our strategy. So again, in the workforce, it could be trying to pitch yourself to a brand new client with whom you have zero clout. You don't know how it's going to go. It could be advocating for a bigger promotion. It could be advocating for a salary. All of these conversations can feel incredibly awkward. especially on a continuum. If you're someone who grew up in a household where money wasn't talked about, for you, having the money conversation is going to feel disproportionately awkward to someone who maybe those conversations were more present and more tolerated. So what makes people feel that way really depends on their conditioning, but that's where we start, is we start to look back at our stories and our conditioning. So there's a good chance that we all have felt awkward probably at least once this week, right? Like chances are so when that happens and let's let's use the professional situation of you know, like we want to present in a meeting or we want to talk up speak up in a meeting because we usually have taken like the backseat and we have that Awkward feeling.

5:56 What do we do about that? Mm -hmm. So again awkwardness lives largely in uncertainty right? In these unexpected. So, I did something, I tried something, and the response that came or the moment that followed wasn't exactly, you know, whether I was conscious of it or not. It wasn't what my brain expected or wanted. So, I either wanted, you know, a boisterous response and instead I got silence, right? I expected that they would agree with me. Instead, they contradicted what I said, right? It's something went the other way. A few things are happening very, very quickly. But the first is I just want us to understand what does that moment represent? For many of us, we actually have a very incorrect story about what's happening in that moment. So I don't want to sugarcoat it. Is someone potentially looking at you in that moment for a beat? Sure. We're social creatures. They would almost be rude if they weren't. But they are not harping on it.

6:54 or obsessing over it nearly the way that we think they are. So that moment in our minds tends to linger. We're thinking about it in the next meeting we're in. We're thinking about it in the shower that night. We're still thinking about it while we're making dinner. For that person, that moment has passed. So there's various psychological phenomena. One of the popular one is Elliot Aronson. He discovered the spotlight effect, which is we think people are looking at us, staring at us much more intensely. than they actually are, as though there's a giant spotlight on us. They might be for a moment, but they've honestly turned it back on themselves relatively quickly, right? That's usually the case. The other is the illusion of transparency, which is when we feel embarrassed or awkward about something, even if we don't have the physical signs. Yes, some people get a little red, maybe a little bit warm, sweaty, but we think, oh my God, people can see that I'm internally melting. Right? I'm dying right now. This is going to be horrible. Most people can't actually see through you that easily. So if you have a strategy to sort of, you know, either use some humor or name the awkwardness, we can talk about strategies. It's actually far easier to move through it than we think. And it's the person who has a strategy to move through it quickly. That's the person we actually deem the confident one. Confident people make mistakes all the time. They just have a really fast comeback rate. Their comeback rate is very, very quick.

8:25 Their recovery rate is very, very quick. And we look at that person like, oh, they're confident. They're unflappable. Oh, they're flapped. They just came back. Came back quickly. Right. I like that. So let's talk about those strategies in a second, but I want to back up to is there anything we can do to prepare to feel less awkward or do you think it's just life, right? Like it's going to happen. You're going to feel uncomfortable in certain situations. Yeah. So on the preparation, the prescription is simple, but people won't want to do it. But I'm going to tell you anyway, the prescription is social pushups before you need them. Social muscle is a muscle. It can atrophy. Our team did a research study. You can download it for free at socialmusclereport .com.

9:09 We did a research study on working Americans and social muscle in the workplace. One in three working Americans would rather clean a toilet than ask for help at work. Wild. It is completely wild because we feel awkward. We worry that, oh, they're going to think I'm incompetent. They're going to think I don't know what I'm doing. It's all these things that are, you know, really modern day conundrums. And a lot of it has to do with the system. So I always tell people, listen, this isn't about extroversion, introversion. Yes, there's a component of that. But even extroverted people, I'm pretty 100 % extroverted. Yeah, I feel awkward with the best of them. This is not something for introverts. But what we have to realize is that the system right now is optimized to buff away friction, to buff away social mishaps.

10:02 If I wanted to, Betsy, today, today, if I wasn't talking to you right now, if I wanted to, I could order my lunch on DoorDash. I could get my groceries on Instacart. I could, you know, Slack DM my teammates. I have been married 20 years, but I swipe whatever direction and go get a date, right? We don't actually have to physically talk to someone where there could be a, oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt you. What did you say your name was again? Like, we barely have to do that. And so because we're not getting practice in those little moments, those big conversations like salary advocacy, promotion, you know, would you consider working with me? Let me make an offer to you. They feel gigantic in the level of awkwardness. So how do we prepare? Again, silly little things like, you know, take the long way in the grocery store and chat up the cashier if there's nobody behind you. Take your headphones out from time to time in the coffee shop and, you know, see if you can strike up a conversation. It's those small practice moments that we've all been eliminated. that make it hard for us to tolerate those bigger moments where ambiguity is likely. Oh, that makes so much sense. And how about virtual world? How does that play into just with work with so many people being remote or just on Teams meetings or Zooms meetings? Has that impacted this as well? For sure. Because again, when we're in proximity with each other, I would say the only, not the only, but one of the common virtual awkward moments, it seems to be the one that happens on repeat, is when you've got a group and people start talking over each other, right? And you're like, oh, I'm sorry, go ahead. Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead, right? That's kind of the extent of

11:33 what we would call like the little dance that we would do in person. But it's not the same, you know, in person, it turns into, oh, I totally misunderstood what you said. Oh, I, you know, with that thing you said in the meeting, I wrote it down incorrectly. We just don't have that hallway chatter. We lost our hallway read. So virtually, what I tell people is we actually have to build this in. Awkwardness has also felt like a heightened emotion because We don't see other people tripping over themselves. We don't see other people getting it wrong. We're doing all of these conversations in silos. We don't overhear it anymore. So it feels like it's just us. It feels like I'm the only one stepping in it. I'm the only one who feels mortified that I didn't have that answer right at my fingertips.

12:18 When we have a virtual meeting, we can create space for that. So I tell executives and teams, hey, at the five minutes at the start of the meeting, please you know, just spend a couple minutes sharing cracked egg stories where everyone goes around and to share one example of a cracked egg. That's a time that they messed up. They made a mistake. They stepped in it and people are like, well, why do we want to start like that? Because first of all, it normalizes that this is what's happening even when we don't see each other doing it. But second of all, research suggests that when we start a meeting with something like that, the rest of the ideas that follow in that meeting are more creative. They're more generative. They're more, you know, interesting because we've sort of let our guard down right at the beginning. And so there's so many reasons that exercises like this now need to be baked into the fabric of virtual teams. I've never heard that term cracked egg. When you first said that, I'm like thinking, what the heck is a cracked egg? But that makes sense. I love that. And I can totally see that. That just takes the, I don't want to say the seriousness out of the room, but it is. Some people come in and you're, you know, going from one meeting to the next and just go, go, go. It's like taking people outside of their like, just constant routine and having to think a little differently and letting their guard down. I love that so much.

13:30 Exactly. Pattern interrupt, right? Love it. Okay. So we have been in a situation and we feel awkward because we messed up what we were saying or didn't say the right thing and now we're sitting there, you know, cringing about our behavior. So what do we do to recover? Maybe we can fix it in that moment and maybe not, but how do we move forward after we have that cringe moment? Yeah. I mean, it depends on the severity of the cringe, right? Not every awkward moment is designed equally. I would say depending on size, there's two different moves or two different roads that you can take. So for something that's small, I think speed and humor tend to be damage control, right? So if it's a small thing, you don't need to make it a big thing. It's just that quick response and a little bit of humor. So one of my favorite examples in the book is Sarah Blakely, when she was early with Spanx, she told a UK reporter about the product and she was saying that Spanx smooths your fanny before anyone explained to her what that word fanny actually means in the UK. It means, let's just say a different body part in the UK. So of course, That could be something that would make some people go, I can't recover from this. I've lost focus entirely, but she kept going. She's very good at just continuing and taking the moment, owning it and keep going.

14:54 Her comeback rate is higher than a lot of people I've seen. She is playful and she kind of sometimes says what she thinks without thinking it through, but she comes back really quickly. for a real misfire where the awkwardness, you know, may have been a little bit higher stakes. You know, someone feels a little bit hurt by it, or they feel like it was a little bit too far. This is where, you know, this is a misfire and requires repair, right? This requires naming it very quickly saying, you know, I'm sorry, this is an awkward situation that I've created. I noticed it. I noticed the temperature in the room change. You know, let me address it now and what I meant by that. So this is kind of like admitting where your first signal felt short, sending a corrected signal. But in most cases, I like to think that awkwardness tends to sit on the side of those smaller situations. The bigger ones where it's, you know, potentially hurt or conflict, those require a slightly different set of skills with awkwardness in particular, usually a little bit of ownership, usually a quick response and humor go a long way. The last thing I would just add is naming it. Ironically, the avoidance of awkwardness increases awkwardness. Totally agree with that.

16:04 The longer you sit in it, you're like, it's just getting worse. So the first person to say, well, this is a bit awkward. Oh, that was a bit embarrassing. It tends to like take the balloon down and just take that sting out of the moment. and allow us all to laugh, all of our shoulders drop, and we can move on. It's a very human thing that we can all agree has happened to all of us. So it kind of just brings it back to the moment. Well, and especially if you're the person in the room who didn't do that, right? You're sitting there, you feel awkward for that person a lot of times. You're like, oh, I feel bad. But if they do just acknowledge it, move on, whatever, it does sort of help to like, okay, they're going to be okay. They're going to keep moving on. You know, it's not going to derail their entire day, even if it is slightly to themselves. But yeah, and I'm all for being authentic, right?

16:48 And I've gotten positive feedback, whether I'm speaking at an event and I mess up and I do something, you know, just being quick to call it out and sort of joke about it and move on. And then I just think it makes people feel so much more comfortable. Like, well, yes, guess what? We're all human. We all have awkward moments. We all do things and we're like, oh crap, I can't believe I did that, said that, whatever. Tripp, spill coffee. I'm a big coffee spiller, which is awkward if you're... doing that in a meeting. But yeah, it's just we're all human. We're going to have those moments. So just being real about it and moving on, I think, is really great advice. And one of those things that is always easier said than done, I think, but it's if you're kind of thinking about it when you're not in that situation, you can help to mentally prepare for when it happens. Yeah. Can I share an example that I think you'll like? Absolutely. Maybe you know it already, but you know, Simon Sinek has a story that he tells about he was giving a keynote and for whatever reason, in the middle of it, he just blanked. Completely blanked on what he was going to say next. And so he decided in that moment to literally look at the audience and go, I just, my mind just went completely blank.

17:53 What was I just saying right before this? Somebody in the audience shouted out, you know, you were just talking about this and this. And he's like, ah, yes. Okay. Thank you. And kept going. This was one of his highest ratings he's ever gotten on a keynote. Now, what's the takeaway from this? Some people hear stuff like this and, you know, actually there's a study about, you know, spilling coffee that Elliot Aronson's team did and how it was considered relatable. So people are like, well, should I, you know, should I purposely put a blender in there? No, it doesn't work when you fabricate it. The whole point is that when one of those moments inevitably occurs, which, hi, you're human, it will, that you just learn how to own it with grace. But today, especially, and this ties a lot to the second book, polish or over polish has gotten so cheap that polish has actually started to feel suspicious. Sure.

18:44 So more than ever, we are putting more outsize value on the person who is giving us all of this stuff without sanding and smoothing away the edges. We appreciate it. even more than we did before. Right. When it feels real and relatable versus super polished or heck AI created at this point, whatever. Correct. It's funny when you were saying about Simon, it made me think too, and maybe because one of our recent episodes is about perimenopause, but I can't tell you how many conversations I've had in the last, I don't know, let's say year, where a woman is talking and she has that blank perimenopause moment where she forgets the word and now… Just call it out, especially if it's to other women. And I don't know if it's uncomfortable. Oh my God, I'm totally having a parabenopause moment. Like, and then they move on, right? Like, but it's otherwise you do, you sit there and you feel awkward when we have that moment of forgetting a word or whatever. So I can totally relate to that. So I love that. I mean, I don't love forgetting words, but I love that. Sure. Yeah. I'm with you. Be real about that. So the good awkward is really helping us to be brave enough to show up, right? But let's switch a little bit or kind of evolve into your latest book, which is right about now the time is episode the signal gap.

19:53 So tell us what that is really as this next layer. Oh my gosh, I'm so excited about this book. So it's called the signal gap, how to boost believability and influence in the age of doubt. And I know, you know, a lot of your listeners are women, although you've got a mixed bag and a lot of women, you know, all of us are looking for an edge on how do we accelerate that building of influence, that building of trust, whether we're using it for sales, leadership, our own self -advocacy, communication with trying to get an outcome, that is influence. We are trying to get someone to do something, and that is harder than ever. So I'm just going to slightly brag out of the gate. I am so grateful for this book to have interviewed some of the most brilliant thinkers in the influence and trust space, Seth Godin, Daniel Pink, Adam Grant, and then some of the boss women, Dory Clark, Tasha Yurik. folks that have studied this stuff their whole lives.

20:45 And the part that I'm most excited about is I approached all of those people with this one idea of everything you have ever taught us feels correct. And I also fear is incomplete in this moment in time that the world has changed so much. And I set out to sort of finish that sentence because the world now is so skeptical. Yep. We do not trust by default. So a good awkward helps you, you know, find the courage, find that confidence to have the conversation. You've gotten yourself into the room. The signal gap now addresses ensuring that what we communicate and what we intend to communicate actually lands with an increasingly skeptical, distrustful, I don't know whether to believe this or not, audience. And so that's now the next turn of the wheel. Oh my gosh, that's so important. And you know, influence is one of those things where I think sometimes people think, well, I'm not in leadership or I'm not in sales or marketing. I don't need to be influential.

21:43 No, you need to be influential whether you're a coordinator or an intern in your day to day, professionally and personally, right? Like that's just how we, so how do we even start with that, right? That's such a big undertaking. How do we start to grow that? Yeah. So first thing, you know, in the spirit of this book, I would say the one piece of awareness that's a fundamental shift that everyone just needs to accept is that we have shifted from what used to be trust, then verify, to verify, then trust. So many years, if you've worked in any sort of business context, whatever level you're at, you probably heard this expression, trust, then verify, which essentially says, you know, humans should trust each other unless They give us a reason not to. So we meet someone, we generally give them the benefit of the doubt. If something smells a little off or seems a little fishy, then maybe we'll go searching.

22:38 That is no longer the case. The dynamic has shifted. We verify then trust. We now live in what I call the verification era. So I'll prove this to you. If you were to be sold a car, And would you go blind to the dealership and then say, well, only if something feels weird, am I going to go Google this later? If you had a friend who was going on a first date and didn't Google that person first, you'd say, are you trying to be murdered in the restaurant? This has become our standard behavior. We will do this before we interact with someone. We will do this while they're talking on our phones. We'll start Googling them. mid -sentence. So it used to be that we would extend benefit of the doubt first. Now we are in this verification era and that's a result of, you know, eight different shifts that I talked about in the book. But essentially the learning here is that it used to be to be influential. There was a few things that people were looking for.

23:32 They were looking for clarity. They were looking for competence and they were looking for confidence, right? Some of your presence. Those three things are table stakes now. Everybody needs those minimum, but they are table stakes now. Now, what people are also looking for is congruence. Congruence across four different layers that I talk about, but congruence simply means that what you say, what you mean to say, your intention underneath of it, and what the verifying audience actually receives, are all pointing in the same direction. And there's a lot of spaces in the modern day climate that we live in where even for the highest intent person, and this new book is written for the high intent person, where that's breaking and people don't even realize it. So it's been really fun watching head explosions happen as they learn where it's breaking. Is there a certain part, is like there's consistently breaking at the same part? Well, it's breaking across all of the layers. There's four layers, but the most popular ones for discussion have been communication congruence and belief congruence. I'll just give you a very simple example of each of them. For the first one, again, I know you work with a lot of females in business. Let's just say you are advocating for a promotion for yourself, and you write your boss a multi -paragraph, very detailed, researched impassioned email making

25:04 a case for why you've earned this position or this promotion, right? Okay. In detail. You put a lot of effort into it. Probably took you 30 minutes to an hour minimum to put this thing together. Your boss is an executive at a big company. You get a response from your boss with a detailed responding to each of your bullet points, super thoughtful, super personalized, eight minutes later. So Betsy, I'm just, I'm going to ask you. What would be your immediate reaction to that? I would assume that they did not write it. Right. AI. Yeah. Right? Yeah. You, ChatGBT wrote this, Claude wrote this. Now, here's the thing. People are like, oh, because it sounded like AI. You know what? Let's put that aside.

25:46 No. If they really have set their AI up, well, maybe not. Probably doesn't sound like AI anymore. But our brains, before we can realize that we're doing it or not, we are searching for patterns. We are searching endlessly for patterns. So let's think about this for a second. So your boss, who's the executive of a large company, you're telling me with the schedule that they normally have going in and out of meetings, not only in eight minutes read this very detailed email where you put all of these different things in there that you would research. Not only do they read it in eight minutes, they then had the time to consider what you wrote and put together a detailed response to each point in eight minutes. You're like, no way. The time stamp. gave it away. So here's the thing. People are like, well, is that wrong? The person felt slighted. They felt like they didn't care. So here's what they need to do instead. Was the boss a low intent person?

26:40 Were they a jerk? Absolutely not. The boss was a high intent person that was optimizing for something else. They were optimizing for speed. They were optimizing for, I like this employee. I don't want to leave them hanging. I want to respond to them quickly, right? There was no low intent here. Sure. But the intent didn't matter. It created a believability break. Right. It created a trust break. So instead, they could have either gone old school and said, hey, received, but I am in and out of meetings for the next five hours. Likely won't look at this till tomorrow, right? But just wanted to let you know I saw it. Or, hey, Read this quickly before I ran into my next meeting and I didn't want to leave you hanging. So just full transparency I used AI to help me organize my thoughts. Yeah, but the thoughts are all mine Let's find time to discuss next week, right? Either of those would have kept believability intact. Yep Examples like that abound but that's Yeah. And it's funny, I was working with a company and their CEO was very into AI and was not one to write long emails or elaborate responses. And suddenly everything became very lengthy and it just felt so cold.

27:51 And even as like an outside consultant, like I could see his team getting so visibly upset because it's like, well, he doesn't care. He's not thinking, right? And it was like, he thought he was optimizing his time, but it was like, and let's be honest, sometimes they didn't even make sense, but it was kind of like the whole point of like, He doesn't care. He can't take five minutes to come walk down the hall and talk about this. So it's that impact that that's having on the person. There's not a relationship. And you start to lose that credibility, which ultimately impacts influence no matter what your title is. Yeah. I love, Betsy, that you said that because these are those subtle things that our brain... may pick up unconsciously, but in many cases, our gut picks up on it before our brain does. So you're like, this person normally writes three -sentence emails. Now they're writing three -paragraph emails, right? For some people, they see that conscious and their logical brain grabs it. For others, they don't even realize that that's what changed. They just know that something did, and this feels icky now, right? So it's often like, it's not our gut, it's actually the signals.

28:51 I mean, it's maybe in part gut, but what I'm setting out to help people understand in the book is a lot of this thing we say is gut, something feels off. Vibes are weird, right? There's actually a congruence issue. There's an incongruence across one of these four layers. And so part of what I want people to understand is this is happening. Let's give language to it. So either you can identify it in others, but more importantly, catch yourself in spots that you may not even realize you're doing it. Oh, so true. So how do we be more intentional about that, right? Like almost like an audit of ourselves because we all probably have those times or moments where we can be better. So where do we even start with that? Yeah. So again, the prescriptions vary depending on which layer of congruence we're talking about. But let's say we're talking about communication in the example that we just gave.

29:37 You know, there is a self -audit that we need to do. Typically, You know, people say, well, does this mean, you know, mean what you say, say what you mean? No, it's not that. Again, it's not that we're trying to be dishonest. It's understanding that the level of clarity required now for people to not assign intent to you is even more than it needs to be. So the biggest solution to the communication congruence is to name your intent to actually upfront, say. you know, hey, I'm going to be using AI to help me write this email. You know what, we're going to have this meeting and I just want to let you know upfront that I'm going to lead with all the parts of this project that are going to be really hard on us because otherwise my fear is I'm going to want to bury it because that feels easier for me. Right? It's that level of, you know, intent naming upfront about what are we doing, why we're doing it, not smuggling under corporate comfortable language, right? There used to be so much, you know, for many years, vague was actually a form of strategic politeness, right? You know, we'll get back to you when we know something. That felt like strategic politeness.

30:47 Today, We don't have the ambiguity tolerance. Our door dash tells us it's going to be here between, you know, 332 and 335, right? We don't have the tolerance for, well, we'll let you know whenever. So what we are looking for people to say to us now is some version of, you know, I am uncomfortable with the fact that I don't have an answer for you right now. I'm going to have to share some news that's going to probably land a little bit more challenging than I want it to. And I'm going to deliver it the best I can, even if my words aren't perfect. But I want to let you know that this is my intent, right? This is what I'm expecting. People are looking for that. It used to be considered radical transparency. Now it's what people are looking for as a baseline.

31:29 And that is a shift. And do we ask people we work with or our team for feedback on this, like how we're landing, like how do we do that? How do we get sort of feedback of how we're showing up or how our influence really is? Yeah, I think it's a courageous thing to ask, but I love it when people ask each other, like how am I coming across, what are my signals saying that I'm not? I'll just give you a very easy example. I have a good friend who I know has a very big heart, okay? We have communicated. you know, together as peers, as colleagues for many years. And sometimes I will send an email about a project that we're working on together, and it'll have, you know, a deck or an outline, something I've worked hard on. Sure. And within two minutes, I get a looks great, thanks. And so again, depending on the relationship, I wouldn't be able to say that to somebody who was a loose colleague. But because this person's not a loose colleague, it's someone with whom I've built trust, I say, hey, that actually felt crappy. right? I know that your intention was good, but there's no way you looked at it. So I would rather you not pretend, right?

32:40 I would rather you not pretend that you opened it, that you read through it, and it looks great. Just don't respond at all before you kind of give me this, this platitude. And he was like, oh, oh my God, right? So again, not low intent. Sure. Busy, busy person. who is trying to fire off, but these are those small, you know, that's, I hate to be cliche, but like death by a thousand paper cuts that make us stop believing a person over time. And this is where, you know, one of the huge theses of the new book is that influence and trust today live and die on one hinge. And that's believability. If we don't believe you, we won't be influenced by you. And we definitely won't trust you. We have to make sure skepticism is addressed first. That is that is so that is so true and that's so good and that influences You know a team and their motivation or their engagement or their their willingness to Give a shit. You know, whatever it is, it has a pretty big impact on how your team ultimately shows up. So I think sometimes there's this confusion that I have influence or credibility because I'm in a certain position, right? Like, oh, well, I'm the director of the department. Of course I have influence. And it's not about the title.

33:56 I think there's a total misconception on the title piece. You could be the CEO. Heck, you could be the president. And you might not have influence, right? It's not always title related. And some of that goes back to the relationship. Absolutely. You know, what I think is interesting too, with both of these topics, they're so good and I love how they go together, but are very different. But if you had to like boil it down, it seems like so much of that is about being genuine and authentic, right? Like in how you're showing up and again, we're human, we're gonna mess up, we're gonna do things wrong, but it's being genuine of how you're showing up and then how you... fix it when you don't do it right. Yeah, so it's funny that you say that. One of the distinctions I needed to make early in the book is how is congruence different than authenticity?

34:42 Oh. And different than consistency. So let's just, you know, I'm going to use not necessarily the definitions in the book, but my own just in my brain definitions. You know, consistency is doing something when, you know, on the rhythm in which you say you're going to do it, right? That's being consistent. Authenticity has about a thousand different definitions. But for the purposes of this, let's say showing up as your fully expressed self in the room with which it feels. you know, safe to do so, right? So an authentic version of you, I believe, can be contextual. A personal authentic version of you, a professional authentic version of you. I don't think any of those versions are liars. It's just contextual. Congruence is a little bit more nuanced in that it has less to do with just showing up fully expressed, but more to do with showing up with all of the parts, even when they're uncomfortable, because they are reality. Because they are true.

35:36 Because what is interesting in this moment right now is, let's just quickly talk about the generational thing. Again, this isn't just a generational issue, but I always like to absolve more senior leaders when I push back on them about some of this stuff and they're like, really? You know, we shouldn't be just keeping the cool. You know, don't we need to be the even keel, the flight attendant who is not making people worry? And I say, listen, I'm not saying fly off the handle. That would not be a good look. But if the company is in turmoil, If people are being laid off, if people are struggling and they are dealing with big emotions and you come in, they're going, we are going through a right sizing right now. And some of this transitioning is going to feel difficult, but we will come out the other side.

36:18 That was something many people of a certain generation were trained to do. They were rewarded to be unflappable in that moment. So there's nothing, they didn't do anything wrong. That was their training. The environment though has changed and the expectation of a millennial employee, a Gen Z employee, is that you don't go down into the despair with them, but that you acknowledge the temperature of the room. So I always like to use the analogy of, if I'm in the hospital getting surgery, I don't want the surgeon to be like, yeah, I'm nervous too. This is really scary. Heck no, I would be running out of there. But I do want them to say, It's really natural, Henna, to feel nervous about this surgery, but just know it's one that we've done 100 times before, and we are well equipped to handle this.

37:05 Makes sense. That's just honest. That's just honest, but you're building trust. But that's more honest than the, it'll be fine, don't worry about it, right? Like we want the honesty. And so a lot of leaders who were trained on that previous thing, when they are that unflappable version, There's a whole swath of people now who view them as being evasive or being cagey or not living in the same reality as they are. So there's a real opportunity to bridge those gaps now. That's, no, that's a great point. And again, it goes back to how it's landing and it's going to land differently for everyone. So yeah, you don't want to be, you don't want to be fake. You don't want to be robotic. You don't want to be painting a sunshine and roses picture when it's not. So it's how that's landing. That's, that's hard. And not to use as, you know, as I said about the genuine part, I was like, I kind of want to take that back because Part of you is thinking how like some people use it as an excuse, right? Like the further delivery that is is either just short or like maybe it's kind of rough or rude Then they're like, well, that's just how I am like and they want to use that as the excuse So I'm like actually I want to take that back because part of that is then people use that as an excuse versus no Really? How are you landing? How are you? How are you from the other side of it? So it is interesting to think about the other person's perspective versus how you're just trying to put something out there Yeah, I think of what you meant Just maybe making you feel better about this. I think what you meant by genuine, and I'm just going to paraphrase, is part of what creates believability right now

38:36 is saying the awkward part out loud. And when we deem someone genuine or sincere, they're not performing. They're not trying to perform. They're not performing past it. Right? They're just staying in it. Even when it's uncomfortable, even when it's like creating a body, you know, tension in them, they stay there anyway. Yeah. So I think, you know, your word wasn't wrong. I think it's, you know, just interpretation. What does it mean? If we are defining genuine that way, then absolutely. That makes sense. Thank you for not making me feel awkward. Listen, if you do feel awkward, great. We're doing great. Hey, I haven't gotten to read your book yet, so I'm excited to read it. So speaking of, so where can people find more information and connect with you? And of course, when your book's available. Oh, thank you. No. So thesignalgap .com has lots of information about the book, but it is available everywhere.

39:28 Books are sold. So Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Target .com, Bookshop, all your favorite indie store. You know, you can request it anywhere. I am Henna Pryor on all the socials. So that's H -E -N -N -A, last name Pryor, P -R -Y -O -R, although LinkedIn. and Instagram are probably my two primary playgrounds. And, you know, I'm so passionate about the difference that this insight and work is going to make on people's communication. So if you grab the book, I am not a diva. You know, DM me. I want to hear from you directly. Like, how are you applying it? What did it make you think about? Who did it remind you of? These conversations honestly become fuel for creating content in the future. So I would love to hear from anyone. No, that's so great. And it's one of those things when you start to talk about it, it's like, OK, it can feel overwhelming. But to me, it's always like, OK, let's acknowledge it. Let's understand what it is. And then slowly, you're just going to make changes. Or you're going to catch yourself in that situation or the next time you feel awkward and be like, oh, I'm OK. I'm going to get through this. And this is how I'm going to get through it. So I love that you even open up the doors to these conversations. It's great. And I can't wait to read the tips and the strategies of how to overcome it for sure or improve it. So thank you so much for being here. Of course, thank you for having me. OK, I definitely have sent the looks great thanks email when I was moving too fast. Hannah's example made me stop and think about how that might land with someone who's spent an hour putting the work together. My intention may have been, I appreciate this. The message they receive could have been, she didn't even read it. That's what I'm taking from this conversation.

41:00 I want to be willing to feel a little awkward and say the thing. Also want to pay attention to what people are actually hearing once I do. If you want to explore that more, Henna is sharing the first chapter of the signal gap for free at thesignalgap .com backslash loud and lifted. I'll put the link in the show notes too. Until next time, stay loud and keep lifting.