 I'll never forget, pre-pandemic, I was on a conference call. Three of us were remote, three people were in the office. And it wasn't until the 26th minute of a 30 minute meeting that someone in the office said, does anyone on the phone have something to share? We have been excluded the entire time. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. In fact, I recently saw a study that shows that we tend to hold our breath when we're reading email. Like think about that, we're holding our breath when we are reading email. You know, actually this is why I wrote an entire chapter in my new book, Digital Body Language, called Why Are You So Stressed? Where I decoded the foremost anxiety prevoking signals in digital body language. The first one is brief messages where it says we need to talk, dot, dot, dot. If you get that from a friend, it might be fun, like gossip. If you get it from your boss, you may feel you're about to get fired. Another one is passive aggressive messages or seemingly passive aggressive. We've all received phrases like, per my last conversation with you or bumping this to your top of your inbox. And we don't know whether someone's just being like really obnoxious or is using a phrase that they learned in business school. The third one is slow or no responses if we haven't heard back from someone. First, we start to wonder what's going on. Then we might get angry at them. Then we fight, finally, maybe they just missed it and we followed up, but it is anxiety producing. And last but not least is formality confusion. And I call this when you had an informal conversation, maybe brief, informal emails with someone and then all of a sudden they start starting with their messages with dear Erika and ending with regards. You start to wonder what's going on or you used to be able to text them to schedule to call or call them out of the blue. And now they're like, work with my assistant to get on my calendar. And so I think what is important is to remember that digital communication can be anxiety provoking. But what you should do is that you should always ask yourself two questions. In this situation when I'm feeling anxiety, who has more or less power and how much do we trust each other? And if there's a high power and trust gap, remember that anxiety can be very common and to stop getting emotionally hijacked. To remember that someone might be typing fast, like if we get an all caps, what does that mean? Someone might be typing that fast, they might not be shouting, they might be excited or if they're my 75 year old father, they just don't know how to un-caps a text message. So like let's be honest that this is an opportunity to just let it go and focus on clear communication. There are so many things to unpack. First of all, I wanna set the record for some folks who might be listening to this. And if you're listening to this and your first thought is you guys are talking about e-mails, come on guys. No, I feel it. I've noticed myself get wound up to such a degree. And then when I'm going out of my mind and I try to figure out why I'm so worked up and then I come up with nothing, that I realize that it has been all this digital communication that has spun me out of control and you throw a refrigerator breaking down in the middle of your day. On top of all that, I'm gonna lose my mind. Now on those tab locks, here's another thing that I don't think people pay attention to. There is, what are your own preconceived notions bias is about a person who uses all caps. For myself, I tend to think that people I don't have any evidence behind this except my own personal experience that people who use all caps are narcissists. That my message is more important than everybody else's and you need to see it. And I don't care if you think that I'm yelling, it's more important that you see my message. That's, and that may not be how that person, as you mentioned, they might've been in a hurry. They might've been old. It just happens to be that way. But I certainly know people who do that and I've connected those dots. Now I'm gonna think that everybody who types in all caps is a narcissist. And then another one that you mentioned is the formalities. For myself, I will always, and I do this with AJ all the time and I do it with a lot of folks. And sometimes I feel bad if I'm doing an FYI. Just for your information, this is not me. And I'll be like, does that sound condescending? All right, I'm sitting in FYI. But I do it all the time. I'm just like, heads, for me, it's just a, hey, it's a heads up. But I don't know how the other person who's receiving that, what their day has been like and what they're reading into that. And we have talked about this in our programs in depth that you, it doesn't matter how you feel or what you think your presentation is saying to other people, they are going to read it from their own experiences and their own emotions and perceptions. And that's what you need to be careful of and why you need to make the best presentation to what you know is a good presentation. And then you can let go of how they're going to receive it. That's right, Johnny. In fact, in my research on digital body language, I found that punctuation, like all caps, exclamation points, can even be read or interpreted differently, not just by the person, but even by gender, generation and culture. In fact, one study found that in all caps messages, if you receive it, if you receive an all caps message saying, you know, what does that mean? From a man, you're more likely to think it's urgency. It's about urgency or shouting from a woman. You may be more likely to see it as excitement. And I'm a big fan of breaking biases, but it's important to see this. In fact, another study showed that a younger person that uses emojis with a senior person might be more likely to be seen as more immature, but if the senior person starts to use the emojis first and then the younger person mirrors them, it's more appropriate. So again, these are cues and signals that really matter today. And understanding that you have a digital body language presence and people maybe making preconceived notions is important, but also to take a step back to assume the best intent in others, to break your own bias when you read messages from others. I mean, I had a quote from someone who said, I will never hire someone who has an earth link or hotmail account. They're too outdated. You know what, it's just an example of digital body language bias that we might have in today's world. We drop great content each and every week, and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. You bring up a great point about the generational differences, because even now, being someone who's a millennial who's been raised in digital communication, I mean, basically once I hit middle school, I was online and that's been the basis for most of my communication since, I was fortunate enough or unfortunate enough my fiancee sister who's a Gen Z or stay with us. And she was teaching us that these emojis that we're sending have different contexts and meetings in Gen Z versus millennial. And of course, if you go on TikTok, there's wars around those two generations. So many of us in our daily lives are only really interacting with our generation, but then we get into the workplace and we're finding that we have to manage both a generation older than us and a generation below us. And that could be really jarring to figure out what is that norm? Do I send the emoji to my boss or do I send the emoji to the Gen Z'er or is that going to be too informal and lead to, again, digital miscommunication? So I feel like so many people need to read your book and so many companies need to really realize that this is such an important part of setting the culture and the tone and to alleviate our anxiety that we're bringing into work around communication and miscommunication. I did a set of interviews of office workers across generations and what I found was the differences in digital communication preferences even within generations were impossible to ignore while an older millennial may think a quick phone call out of the blue was fine because they grew up with landlines. A younger millennial would hate a phone call out of the blue. We'll be like, I will never check your voicemail. And so not only is this generational, even there's micro generations with experiences related to this. What I did find is generally, there are those that are fully on digital natives, body language natives, and those that are what I'll call the digital body language adapters. Those that feel like immigrants to a digital world, they can't wait to go back to face to face that love that quick phone call out of the blue where we'll send that long message. My father sends me texts that start with Dear Erika and with Love Dad and it's so long like a handwritten note but I haven't taught him that a text is not the same as a letter. And then a digital native who will hate, like be totally scared of a phone call out of the blue or really proper texture I am. And I think what is important regardless of age is to actually have conversations with your colleagues. Are you a native? Are you an adapter? Are you what I call a chameleon? Which is someone in the middle and don't worry there's a quiz in the book where you can assess yourself and assess your team and have conversations about these differences so that you're not just creating a lot of anxiety but you're focusing on what will best serve the task at hand as well in terms of the workplace especially. I think another miscommunication that many in our audience resonate with and I know a lot of our clients who are introverts and sometimes lacking in confidence feel is reading into the silence. So in a group chat it's very easy for an introvert to feel overwhelmed, maybe not sure if they wanna interject or how to interject and of course for the rest of the group they can read that silence as disinterest, completely upset with the group and all the other things that silence leads to. And it's important to communicate those norms both ways to understand the other person and what they're expecting in communication and if you feel that maybe your emotions are getting the best of you to check in separately outside of that group Slack that group chat with that person to make sure that you're not reading into something and assuming negative things about your peers, your coworkers and people that we need good communication with. I work with a leader in financial services and she runs a global team, she's in New York City but she has a team member in London, in Sydney, Australia and in Buenos Aires, Argentina. And on regular Zoom calls she found that her colleague in Buenos Aires was not engaging on the call. First she started to think maybe he's multitasking then she thought maybe he's just not interested and then finally she realized maybe I should stop assuming and just ask. She said him and I am during the meeting and he said, I'm having such a hard time translating three different English accents when English is not my native language an American, a British and an Australian accent at the exact same time while they're all talking fast. And what she realized is she had to check her bias around this and how hard this can be for different people. They started using Zoom's closed captioning. They used the chat much more, I know other leaders who actually now create a pause in their meetings and they say I want everyone to share their thoughts and chat over the next three minutes. Then I'm gonna call on people that have different perspectives and it really avoids that bias of just extroverts who are gonna jump in and introverts who don't have time to share. We actually tend to think better in writing first before speaking and this can actually be a practice to make hybrid or live meetings even more thoughtful in the future because of the power of chat tools that we've learned over the last 16 months. I love that and I feel many of us are now sitting in Zoom rooms where it is overwhelming when there's so many competing voices and you not only have the extroverts but you also have the gunners who want to prove themselves who don't have that time or space that they would have had at the water cooler or they would have had in the office to get the face time that they feel they need to get ahead and get promoted and lost in the shuffle is great ideas. And you talk about this in the book that we can't access the creativity. We fall into this group think where just the loudest voice on Zoom becomes the norm and no one else gets to chime in and that leads to bad decision making, bad outcomes in business and a lot of regret and hurt feelings on team members who feel unheard and disconnected. That's right. I mean, I believe that we have to reactivate what I call virtual or hybrid water cooler moments. I'll never forget pre-pandemic, I was on a conference call, three of us were remote, three people were in the office and it wasn't until the 26th minute of a 30 minute meeting that someone in the office said, does anyone on the phone have something to share? We have been excluded the entire time. And so I actually think if we can use the last year to be more self aware, to be more thoughtful we can create things like virtual water office hours where everyone gets on and co-works no matter the distance. Maybe simple, even lunch breaks where we're inclusive of those that are remote versus often being biased to who is around us in the office. And these things are going to make our businesses better because we're gonna capitalize on the collective expertise of everyone, not just who's in front of us.