 Being able to concisely express your ideas while empowering people to listen and inspiring them to act is one of the most valuable commodities that we have to sell as people, both personally and professionally. However, so many people just resign themselves to be in the right way. I'm just not very good at this and that's the end of that. Well, how do we get people to change their minds about their communications skills? And what are the steps that they have to take in order to improve them? Okay, so before I go any further, I'm going to address the elephant in the room and tell you that I stood up. And stuttering is awesome because you can't say the things that you want to say when, you know, everybody else can just talk and you're like, my name is shush, shush, shush, shush, and it's very embarrassing. It's very hard to deal with. However, it has taught me a lot of lessons. But even all of the lessons I've learned, it doesn't take away from the fact that I have trouble, you know, saying my name, that alone, you know, talking to people about something I'm passionate about or something that I'm just interested in and it has affected pretty much every area of my life, both my personal life as well as my professional one, and even though it is awful at times, I feel like I've learned a lot of practical lessons. So this talk is called How to Talk to Humans, and I think a basis of just talking to people is a conversation, right? And so we can all agree that a conversation is the exchange of ideas, right? So person A has an opinion about something and they want to tell person B, and then person B, you know, responds to it, and then they go hack and forth until they come to a resolution, and then the conversation is over, right? And so how we approach conversations is probably about the same way every time, you know, we think of the words that we would like to use, right? And we think about how we would like to feel how we want to sound and how we want the other person to feel and react, and what we want them to say, right? It's all about us, me, me, me, I, I, I. And that is the exact wrong way to approach a conversation. You have to be thinking about the other person, you know, how do they feel? What do they want to say? The focus has to be on them, right? So how do you make the focus on them? The first thing that you have to do is listen more when you talk. So this is me. I was around three years old. I know, I'm adorable. And this is around the age that my parents told me that I began to stutter, but it's actually pretty normal. A lot of kids who are around, you know, three years old, four years old, they develop some sort of speech impediment. Generally, it's stuttering. Occasionally, it's a little bit of a list. But after, you know, two or three years, it just goes away. And also, stuttering actually runs in my family. And pretty much everybody else has been away between the ages of about 10 and 20. And so, you know, we didn't really think anything of it because it was, you know, obviously, it was going to go away. Not quite, clearly. So as I got older, and as I went through life, and I get all of the major milestones, it became extremely clear that I was going to have to deal with this or as long as it wanted to stick around. And so, like a lot of others stutterers, I developed hoping the mechanisms in order to kind of deal with, a.k.a. avoid stuttering. Something that I did was I used a lot of filler words like ah and like and those things. I would also change words because I was about to come to a word that I thought I was going to stutter on. I was like, no, no, no. I don't want to embarrass myself. So I would think of another word. I actually know a person who was very, you know, just higher level thinking. And so he read the dictionary. So he could always have another word on hand. He's very impressive and clearly had a lot of time. He's also my boyfriend. So eventually I came to a place of like, hey, if I just don't talk a whole lot, I'm probably not going to stutter because I'm not talking. This is a great idea, except it's an awful idea because it either came off as I was either, you know, uninteresting or I was not interested in the other person. And oftentimes it looked a lot like, hello, goodbye, please don't talk to me. And it came off like this. And so, you know, I had to figure out a way to be an active part of the conversations I was in. And and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and not talk a whole lot. And so I began to ask people a lot of questions, right? I would just ask them things until we hit on a topic that they just, you know, loved talking about, right? And so I would do this time and time again. And a pattern of balance. I realized that these people actually like enjoy talking to me, right? And I think it's because I was choosing to, you know, actively listen to them and be, you know, interested in the things that they have to say. So all of us here, I would say, like all the millennials and Gen Y. I believe now there's a Gen Z, apparently. We all live in a sharing society, okay? As people, our brains are wired to connect and we just have a need to be exeptic, right? And so all of the Facebooks and Twitter and all of that stuff, it allows us to be able to share ourselves with other people with pretty minimal budget, right? So as I was talking to people and, you know, hearing all of the things they had to say, I was basically just taking the sharing society offline. And I was allowing them to feel like I was giving them, you know, a thumbs up on themselves or, you know, a T-suite or like that's irrelevant. But yeah, it was. So how does that look for you? It's asking a lot of questions and being actually interested in the answers. And this does two things. It shows the other person that you are both interested in them. And it also shows that you are empathetic towards them. And empathy is a pretty important key in communication. So like a lot of others cutters, I have had my fair share of therapy experiences. I was in speech therapy when I was around eight or nine years old. And then I hooked some time off in high school and college, you know, I got a job and all that stuff. And then I returned to therapy again in my late 20s. I was a freelancer. And so I had to go out there and find my own clients. And I was just having a very difficult time talking to people. I was terrified to even, you know, have coffee with people and the networking events, because I was afraid that I would sound, you know, bad and that I would be judged. And so I sought out therapy as a way to kind of overcome tutter. And so I found a therapist who was around my age. I think she was only two years older than me. And she was also a tutterer. And I went to her and I was expecting to be able to just learn some techniques that would make it a lot easier for me to avoid tuttering. Again, clearly, that's not what happened. But what I did learn from her is how to be a lot more empathetic. I had been around others before. And every time I was, I was so uncomfortable that I would just leave the room. And I couldn't go back here. I had to sit here and I had to listen to her talk. And in the beginning, it was pretty awful that as time went on, it did get easier. And it also helped me to be a lot more empathetic towards her. And as a result, I was able to open up a lot more to her about the emotional side of tuttering and how it made me feel on a day to day basis. I do not believe that there is enough empathy in everyday communication. And that's a shame because empathy is the cornerstone of connecting with other people. Empathy creates the environment for other people to share the meaningful details about themselves with you. And the therapy experience that I have is a perfect example of that. Empathy also helps you to be able to open up to the other person who you were talking to. So I began to speak on about a year and a half ago. I had to hit myself out of my shell. I know that I have said this before, but I was truly just terrified to just talk to people. And so I'm the kind of person where if I was scared of something, I'm just going to do it. I don't know how to swim, so I'm going to jump in the deep end with the sharks. Why not? What could go wrong? And so I was pretty nervous the first time I spoke because I thought that the awful things I thought about myself, I thought that other people would think those things about me and that I would have to face that. Well, it turns out that people didn't judge me. They didn't even ask, they truly embraced me. And they wanted to share clear stories of fear and vulnerability and weakness with me. And I think that's because I was willing to tell my false story. I would give these talks and these talks are pretty exhausting for me. And so after the talk was over, I obviously emotionally drained because I'm showing all of these people the very painful parts of myself. And again, I was ready to just throw it out of the room because I'm done talking now so I'm going to be alone. But I couldn't do that. People would come up after talks and tell me the ways that they were flawed or the things that they were afraid to say or ashamed of or the things that they hid from. I showed my homework abilities. And as a result of that, they were empowered to show me theirs. And that's an important point. A lot of people in this sharing society, they only talk about the good things. They only talk about like, I got a promotion, I got a raise and I'm starting a new business. They don't talk about how it's terrifying to do those things. They don't talk about how hard it is to be an entrepreneur and how incredibly lonely it is. People don't identify with perfect. They identify with being flawed. Right? So your struggles and your insecurities, those are the things that make you incredibly interesting. And that's what people are going to take with them. And so how do you talk to humans? The key is this. It's being empathetic. Being empathetic enough to listen to other people's stories and courageous enough to share your own. Thank you for that talk. I'm curious how in a business environment, how you would translate some of these points that you're making. Because I can see a lot of what you're saying in an overall context. With your co-workers or something like that, maybe in meetings or with other clients, do you feel like these same things translate or how would you shift it? Right. Okay. So the thing I like to tell people about this is that other people are constantly telling you how to talk to them. And so the main thing that you want to do is just pay attention to the cues that other people are giving you. So an example that I have is this. The easiest thing to do is to check out like body language. And there are endless head talks on this. The body language cues that I kind of go by is I really don't want to use this phrase. But anytime people are leaning in, and there I'm now, right? I'm up here, it's never ending. And their arms are a little bit more open and to the sides. They are just a lot more open and interested in things that they have to say. I know that eye contact is another thing. Even though it can be a little bit, people can get a little bit nervous and then they hook away from you. And sometimes it can be taken as like, well, I'm not interested or I don't want to talk to you. And actually it's just, no, no, no, nerves. So those are those two things. In terms of just empathy, the easiest way is to just keep on asking people open-ended questions, right? You truly do just have to listen a lot more than you talk and then kind of allow them to take the conversation to a place where they are just incredibly like open and comfortable and are having a pretty easy time just talking to you. So those are my tips. Thank you. You mentioned that the best way to show someone you're interested is by being genuinely interested. What do you want to be interested in? Which you actually aren't. It depends on the situation. If you're in a personal situation, then I tell it out of there. But if you're in a more professional setting than hard as it is to believe and as hard as that is to practice, every single person has something that is extremely fascinating about them, right? And it's just about allowing the other person to just hit to a place of being comfortable enough to just keep talking to you. And if you allow them to talk enough about the things that they are interested in, then you can kind of control the conversation from there. It's a lot easier to get people to do the things that you want them to do when they feel like actually interested and then and to be actually interested in them, you have to allow them to talk first. I've seen on reality shows like people making American art and on the show, the people who have certain problems, if they sing or they speak like in the way of lyrics, they can speak better. So does it work for you? I mean, I am like Beyonce when it comes to singing in the car. I'm in the wrong career, too bad I can't say. I'm trying to speak like in the normal talk, you can say like just singing some lyrics and you can go fast. Yeah, that's not quite how it works. But they do like teach you things like how to speak in a way that makes you more sing-songy. The problem is that it kind of takes all the inflection and personality out and I would just much rather talk and see what happens. That's all. Give her a round of applause.