Transcription
(Applause)
Well, hello, I know that you guys have been here all day and then you were here all day yesterday and we’re running a little late.
So I’m going to try to go through this as quickly as possible.
But also, I’m going to enjoy the moment and enjoy the crowd.
So we’re going to be talking about a couple of different things today.
It’s going to be a combination of a lot of personal things.
I’m a person who stutters and I talk a lot about that in my talks.
I feel like it’s a really great way to teach the other thing that we’re going to be talking about today, which is empathy.
And over the past, I would say a couple of years, I have really changed how I approach talking about how to be empathetic.
I feel like I was supposed to be talking about it from a place of like, here’s how you do it.
Right.
Here are the tools.
Here are the keys.
And a thing that I have learned over the past, I would say a year-ish, is that you can’t really talk about it without also talking about vulnerability.
And even though a lot of my talks, you know, have been talks where I talked about like being incredibly vulnerable, I feel like I had a really hard time all sort of like tying it together until I began to get a little bit into AI.
And so I’m going to talk a little bit about AI.
I know either you’re like excited about it or you, you know, are like, why do we have to talk about this again?
But I’m not going to talk about it in the same way that a lot of other people are going to talk about it.
So what is the first thing that you think when you see this word?
Now, when I think of humanity, I think about kids playing with adorable puppies or two people walking around in the park hanging out.
Or a group of friends who are all enjoying a glass of wine together, or if you’re like me, a bunch of bottles of wine with me and my friends.
And just like us being in person, connecting and being just hardcore people.
But you don’t always think about technology, which is a shame because everything that you guys are doing in this space, it runs on us being people.
It runs on humanity.
And tech thrives because we as people are the ones who are continuing to really push it through, right?
I know that I think a lot about like social media, right?
All of the really good things that like could be happening on there are a result of all of the work that a lot of people like you are doing, right?
You know, with all of the code and all of the design.
Yes, a lot of bad things are going on there as well.
However, we wouldn’t have those opportunities to really connect with other people who are on the other side of the world if it wasn’t for this technology.
We wouldn’t be able to show our humanity to other people if it wasn’t for some kind of tech.
However, it’s very easy to allow that tech to sort of take over how we view other people, right?
A lot of the things that are currently going on in the world in general I feel like are both positively as well as negatively being impacted by a lot of the things that are going online.
And so, you know, over the past I would say couple of months I have spent a lot of time thinking about like, you know, as our world continues to get more and more overrun with a lot of tech tools, right?
Especially AI.
How do we keep that humanity at the center of all of this tech?
We do it through empathy as well as vulnerability.
So again, hello.
My name is Sharon, and that’s my dog.
His name is Washington.
He’s 25 pounds.
He’s a mini golden doodle.
He’s the light of my life.
My husband would agree that we view our favourite thing as our dog and then each other.
It’s fine.
It’s fine.
And so I have spoken at companies and conferences all over the world for the past, gosh, like 10 years at this point about improving communication and collaboration through engaging empathy.
I talk about a framework I created called the Key Empathy Behaviours where, you know, I teach teams and audiences how to really engage empathy every single day.
I have courses that are available on LinkedIn Learning.
One of them is Communicating with Empathy, and that one has I think it’s something like 800,000 views, which absolutely blows my mind.
And I always like to call that out because a thing that I continue to hear from a ton of people all over the world is that they feel so uncomfortable or not confident enough to really be empathetic.
And they feel like they should be able to do it a lot more easily.
And so I love to remind people that everybody has a hard time with this, and so I am here to just help you sort of reframe how you view being empathetic and being vulnerable, especially in this age where a lot of things are heavily automated.
And again, I’m a stutterer.
You’re going to hear that a lot, and I’m also going to talk about it a lot.
And I began stuttering when I was around three years old, and yes, I’ve been having a panic attack about it pretty much every single day ever since.
So why not pursue a career in public speaking?
That makes sense.
And so I really wanted to sort of use this time to talk about what empathy is going to look and feel like in sort of the current age that we are in.
And in order to talk about empathy, right, we have to first define it.
So empathy is defined as the ability to share the feelings of another person.
And a lot of people confuse sympathy and empathy, and sympathy is a very passive feeling, right, of like, oh, I see a person is going through a thing, and I feel sorry for them.
And then you just kind of go on with your life, whereas empathy is an incredibly active situation where you are attempting to better sort of connect and better see what that person is experiencing by relating their experiences.
And it isn’t you saying, oh, I know exactly how you feel because I went through the same thing.
It’s more of a, you know, I am here to be supportive because I have experienced, you know, challenging things as well.
And so I know the kinds of feelings that you are feeling, and I know how that can be externalized in my behavior.
And so when we are talking about empathy, you know, we really do have to view it as a verb, right?
It is a behavior.
So how do you really engage in this behavior of being incredibly empathetic?
Well, I’ve had to learn how to do this a couple of different ways in my life.
So when I was doing my first course for LinkedIn, it was the first time that I had ever done anything of that scale, right?
Okay, so how it works is you sign a contract, they pay you in advance, and then you write all of your scripts, and then you go out to their studios in California, and you’re there for a couple of days while you record your course.
So I had gone through, you know, the contracting phase, the scripting phase, and I had gotten out to California, and I was ready to record my amazing course.
And I could not get comfortable being on camera because I was going to have to read out loud all of the scripts I wrote.
And now look, okay, I wrote the scripts, they were very upfront about the fact that, you know, you’re going to have to read off of a teleprompter, and I said, hey, it’s fine, I’m going to do it.
But again, I’m the kind of person where I say yes, yes, absolutely, hell yes, and then I have a panic attack about it later.
The problem was that I signed a contract, and they gave me the money, and the money was gone, I spent that shit, okay?
And so I go there, and I tell them I’m going to be fine.
I get on set, I attempt to read this teleprompter, and it’s going absolutely horribly.
I can barely get a word out, and we spent a couple of days of me just panicking because I wasn’t able to read these words that, hello, I had just written, right?
And so at the very beginning of this whole recording experience, they were so excited, right?
Like, oh my God, we haven’t seen anything this good since Charles Dickens, and all of those things that people say to really hit you going.
And over the next couple of days, they’re very positive, and like, oh my God, you’re amazing, you look so good on camera, is that your real hair?
Just all that stuff all went away, and it turned into a, well, we don’t need the scripts.
It could be a thing where we interview you, or another person could do commentary on your scripts, and you could just say one or two things here or there.
And so it became very clear very quickly that I was failing miserably, and it was very uncomfortable.
I was very upset, and I remember at the end of day two, I had gone out to dinner.
It was like around a happy hour time, so like 5 p.m.-ish.
And I was on the phone with my spouse, and I was crying because I was so overwhelmed, and I was so defeated, and I was so upset.
And I wasn’t just like crying, I was like wailing in a restaurant, and it is packed.
I’m crying so horribly, like my server is actively avoiding me.
And this is a person who works on hips, and she was like, nope, I’m good here.
And I was just like, Jesus.
And so on the third day, I decided like, hey, I’m here, and I have to figure out a way to make this work.
Because again, I’ve already spent this money, so we’re going to have to figure this out, because I’m not giving you guys back a dollar.
So I said, hey, is there any way that I could just be in this room completely by myself?
Now, they had never done that with any other author before.
And so I was a little bit terrified to say, hey, like, can we do this in a way that is going to make me feel a little better, even though this is not how it works?
And they were willing to really hear me out.
And as a result of us having this very scary conversation and them completely changing how they conduct their incredibly successful business, I was able to get comfortable enough to read my scripts with enough fluency.
And we were able to create this course.
And now that course, again, has around 800,000 views, which again, bananas.
But I like to tell this story because I think that we as people, we sort of find ourselves occasionally either in conversations or in other situations where we just want people to see our side, right?
We want people to have some kind of empathy for us because we feel that our experience is 100% the most important thing.
However, in order to get empathy, you have to give empathy.
And so I had to walk into this situation and say, hey, look, like, you know, I know that you guys are having equally as hard of a time as I am.
So how can we work together to create something incredible?
How can we figure this out?
And so as a result of us both sort of coming together, of us expressing our fears and our concerns, we were able to figure it out and create something really, really incredible.
And that is why it is so important to focus on, like, being empathetic.
And so, you know, over the past, I would say, six months, I have been doing, I guess I would call it like a live podcast.
It’s available on LinkedIn, and it’s called Empathy in Automation.
And I get to talk to people who are from all different industries about how they are approaching connection and collaboration in this age of overwhelming automation.
And so I have talked to both tech people and, like, other people like me who are not tech people.
And there seems to be a couple of different camps, right?
And so for the tech people, they are always viewing these automation products from a productivity standpoint.
I spoke to Scott Hanselman, and he was focused on how, like, he wants AI to give him Fridays off.
He doesn’t want to just, like, be more productive.
And I thought that that was incredibly insightful, and it was a thing that had a lot of the tech people sort of focused on with this new age of work.
And the non-technical people, they viewed these tools as a collaborative partner.
And, like, I thought that was interesting, how they would use, like, chat PPT to sort of give them some, like, content cues or just some thought prompts that could help them to better connect with the clients or the audiences that they were speaking to.
However, these conversations with all of the people, both tech base and those who are not in tech, these conversations, like, they kept coming back to, you know, how do we center the humanity when we are using all of these tech products?
And for me, it feels like you really have to focus on being vulnerable, right?
So how do you bring vulnerability into play when you are talking about, like, being empathetic?
And I really think that that’s going to come down to, you know, how can we use these tools to share our stories?
I know that, like, I talk a lot about, like, my own experiences as a person who stutters as a way to teach people how to, like, get in the proper mindset to really engage in, like, empathy.
However, I don’t always talk about this sort of emotional part of what stuttering can feel like.
And the first talk I gave, I was actually talking about a lot of the experiences that I had as a child who stuttered, and my mom was there.
And so I was talking about a lot of the feelings I felt about my speech and how those feelings impacted my view of myself.
And because of that, she was able to really see a part of me that she hadn’t ever seen before.
We were able to have conversations about different experiences because I was vulnerable enough and she was empathetic enough to both, you know, listen and for, you know, to share.
And so, you know, how can we sort of use these things to enhance our experience with a lot of these tech tools, right?
How can being vulnerable encourage empathy in this age of incredible automation?
Well, it could enhance our ability to just be a little bit of a better leader.
It can also help us make just more improved decisions and it can foster better relationships.
Now, I kind of want to hang here for a second and explain, you know, why all of those things are true, right?
Because when we think about vulnerability, a lot of the times we are thinking about weaknesses.
We are thinking about fears.
We are thinking about, you know, I don’t want to, you know, have people feel like I am not capable of all of the things that I say I am capable of.
Well, when we sort of bring automation into a lot of the things that we are doing, you know, yes, things are going to be taken away.
However, we can use these tools to give us a little bit more time to enhance our relationships and to become a little bit better at the quote unquote soft skills that we, you know, all have to have in order to be successful.
And so like as these tools are going to take away a lot of the more mundane tasks, it’s important like that we use this extra time to build better relationships with those around us.
So how do we do that?
We do that with, of course, being incredibly empathetic.
And so here’s where I’m going to talk about the key empathy behaviours, right?
How do we, you know, use these key empathy behaviours to be like better people, to, you know, keep that humanity at the center of everything that we are going to do?
So the key empathy behaviours, there are three of them.
They are patience, perspective, and connection.
So the first thing that we’re going to talk about is patience.
And, you know, we have learned about being patient for as long as we have been alive, right?
Like when we’re three years old, four years old, and we’re in, you know, kindergarten or whatever it is, you know, our teachers are talking about like, hey, like we have to be patient and we have to allow other people to speak and then we can talk.
But the problem with a lot of the things that we have learned about being patient is that it’s about the other person, right?
It’s about I have to wait while the other person gets to do their thing.
And it kind of comes off as a little bit unfair, right?
And so I thought, OK, how can we reframe patience into a thing like that is going to have us feel a little more powerful in this process?
And so, you know, I describe being being patient as being obsessively self-aware.
You know, we’re not taught to really examine where a lot of our feelings are coming from, right?
We are going into situations and we’re like having conversations and feelings do come up, yet we just sort of work either through those feelings or we work completely against those feelings and we just power through.
However, when we are trying to be patient, we should be focusing on, OK, how do I feel right now?
Where are those feelings coming from?
Why do I feel this way?
What triggered this feeling that I currently have, right?
And so all that kind of goes back into us addressing our biases as well, right?
Like we have to examine like those things.
Are our biases accurate?
Are they false?
Where did they come from?
How did we learn that?
Why do I feel this way?
And has this person I’m talking to proven me right or are they in the process of proving me wrong?
And so, you know, another thing that I want you to keep in mind here is that when you are being patient, it’s going to be you being OK with not being great at things.
I recently began CrossFit.
It was about like a year ago.
And I’m 40.
And so everybody in the gym is like 25 and gorgeous.
And I am 40 and like slow.
And thank you.
I don’t know who said it, but thank you.
I’m slow and I am uncomfortable and I’m like I have to run a mile.
I don’t know about that.
And like these people are going past me so, so fast.
And I just I feel like, you know, I spent probably six months being terrible, right?
I was so bad and I was so embarrassed about being bad.
But in the process of, you know, like being really bad at things out in the open, I learned how to be patient with just myself.
Right.
Like as we sort of grow, like as we evolve, we are going to come into situations where, you know, we aren’t going to be good at things.
And a lot of us, you know, are attempting to avoid that stuff.
But I think it’s a good idea to, you know, just be okay with, you know, like being a little bit bad at a thing in order to get better at it.
Another part of being patient is also having a clarity.
Now, I said before, like that we need to be very aware of our biases.
You know, we don’t always hear what people say to us.
We hear our opinion of what they say to us.
And so it’s always good to get some clarification in these conversations so you can hear exactly what this person is actually trying to say to you.
And so everything about patience is to like lay the foundation for you to just to begin the conversation.
So the next key in behavior is perspective.
And here’s where you are just trying to get context.
A theme that keeps coming up in my podcast is just focusing on really listening.
And now, you know, yes, we have just talked about patience, but you can’t also be patient and not be a really intent and sincere listener.
You know, people are constantly telling you like how they feel or how to talk to them, how to respond to them, how to show them empathy.
But we’re not always great at really listening to the cues that they are giving us.
Here’s where I also like to say is that, you know, you don’t know everything that’s going on in this person’s life.
Who knows why they are behaving in the way that they are currently behaving.
I know I had a friend who had been just really flaky for a couple of months.
And, you know, I took it a little bit personally of like, wow, like I’ve been calling you.
I’ve been texting you when you like kind of answer, you kind of don’t like, OK, OK. It turns out his mom was incredibly depressed and she eventually passed away.
And so, of course, I’m thinking, wow, you know, he he was giving me all of the cues.
I just didn’t I wasn’t paying enough attention.
One and two, I didn’t have context.
And so a thing that I’ve learned about how to get better perspective is to not take a lot of things personally.
It’s so easy to jump to the conclusion that it’s about you and it rarely is.
Right.
So just give people the benefit of the doubt.
And the whole point of of of of of of pursuing perspective is really to build a bridge.
Right.
So how do we build those bridges?
Well, we have to ask like very important questions.
Right.
A lot of those questions are going to be based around, you know, how this person is feeling and, you know, where these ideas and where these opinions like that they hold are coming from.
So a couple of questions are, how did that make you feel like in this moment?
Like what emotions has this person associate with various experiences?
What is this person currently feeling as they are reflecting on different topics?
Now, you want to really connect their emotions with your emotions.
Because, you know, we all experience a lot of different things.
However, how we experience them is going to be a little bit different for every single person.
Yet we all know how it feels to be uncomfortable.
We all know how it feels to be embarrassed.
We all know how it feels to be sad, to be glad.
And so try to connect, you know, your feelings to what they are currently feeling as a way to have a better understanding of how they view the world.
And now the final key empathy behaviour is connection.
And, like, here’s where you are, like, always going to be looking forward.
Like, here’s how you continue your relationships.
You want to shift how you are thinking about this person.
What do you wish that you understood about their view?
And, you know, how can you continue to learn more from a place of curiosity and not a place of judgment?
And, you know, the other ones here are, like, be present, right?
Like, you aren’t ever going to be perfect at this.
However, it isn’t about constantly getting it right every single time.
Like, it’s about constantly showing up.
Like, that’s how you are going to build solid long-term relationships is by continuing to show up and continuing to give people the kinds of experiences that, you know, they are going to need in order to feel safe and in order to feel included.
You know, it is so important to, you know, remind people that you see them and that you are going to always continue to see them as, you know, you go through the different phases of your relationships.
And so I kind of, I want to close this out by bringing this back to sort of this, like, whole idea that technology, you know, is going to take a lot of things away.
When I am on my show, I close out every single episode by talking to my guests about what is the most positive use of these tools.
Like, that is going to continue to help us, like, build and grow our connections.
And I like to close out on that question because, you know, I want people to feel hope.
Because we are, you know, we are going to continue to have these tech tools in our lives forever.
And, you know, I want people to feel empowered.
I want them to know that, you know, yeah, things are going to be taken away and things are going to be added.
And there are going to be things that, you know, are probably not going to be great.
However, tech isn’t going to take away anything that we don’t allow it to take away.
And so I guess my message here is that for you all, you know, as designers and developers of these tools, it is so important that you continue to keep your humanity at the center, you know, of your building processes.
Because, you know, it’s going to be your perspectives, your personal experiences that are going to create incredibly impactful tools that all of us are going to be able to use in order to be successful and to continue to build really solid relationships.
So that’s all I have.
This is my dog, again, because you guys should all end a conference with a dog.
And, yeah, there’s all my contact information.
So feel free to say hi.
And thank you so much.
Thank you.
(Applause)
