Paul Axtell: teacher of how to communicate with your family and run meetings that matter

Paul Axtell [00:00:00] For instance, there's a traditional, well if he's got his arms crossed, he's not liking what I'm saying. No. People cross their arms to be comfortable. So at the level of, Hmm, I think something's going on for you. Yes. At the level of I can tell exactly what's going on for you. No way.

Vance Crowe [00:00:22] I'm Chris Haworth, a grain originator and accountant living in Pocahontas, Iowa, and you are listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. You're in for a treat. You are about to watch me interview a person that is a master of communications whose skill far exceeds mine. His name is Paul Axtell and he is a very interesting guy. I had no idea when this conversation started where it would go. And in fact, I was given Ben a hard time. I was like, ah, we're gonna talk to a person about conversations. This is like asking a comedian to talk about jokes. It's generally not that funny. But I was shocked. Not only do Paul and I have a surprising amount in common, but Paul thinks about communication differently than I do. And in fact, you'll see a few places where we collide and in longtime listeners of the podcast are gonna hear Paul say things that, you know, I don't agree with. But we end up having a back and forth that I think both of us came away learning a lot. This is a fantastic conversation. I loved it. And we're gonna get to it in just a second. But as you know, we don't have sponsors of the podcast. Instead, I talk about some of the projects we're working on. That might be something that you'd be interested in. Lately I have been talking about the private interviews that I've been doing, and in fact, we've continued to do these. Well after Christmas, I started the private interviews as a way to give people that wanted to have their parents or their grandparents capture their stories.

Vance Crowe [00:01:56] A way to be able to say, what are the values that we have? How did you and mom meet? Where did that uncle come from? What do all these stories that we have in our background, what do they all mean? And I thought I was just gonna do it during Christmas time, but it was so popular and it was such an enriching experience for me. I was so gratified by it that we've continued it. So if you're interested in doing one of these interviews, you can do it for yourself and save it for your kids or for your family, or you can do it for as a gift for a grandparent or a parent or even a child. If you want to capture them as a young person, then head to store Articulate Ventures, and there you can purchase the private conversation and we can get it scheduled and make it happen. This is an amazing experience and I hope you'll take me up on this. The other thing is, as Coronavirus has continued, people are now starting to buy a lot of these telepresence classes. So a few months ago when Coronavirus hit, I decided to put together a class on how do you make yourself look and sound as good as you possibly can when you're on these video calls. And I think a lot of people were kind of waiting around or they thought, well, this will kind of go away. But now that people are realizing, hey, we're definitely in for another six months, maybe another year, and really the world has changed them, I have to do a lot more of these on video. They're finding this class telepresence basic to be really interesting. So if you're interested in learning how to set up your camera, your microphone, your lighting, and not actually spend a bunch of money on equipment, but use what you have to make yourselves look and sound great, then go to the store, Articulate Ventures, and check out the telepresence class.

Vance Crowe [00:03:36] All right, without further ado, enjoy this fascinating conversation about conversation, communication, connecting with people, listening and becoming the best person that you can both at home and in meetings with my new friend and I would say mentor now, Paul Axtell. Paul Axtell, welcome to the podcast.

Paul Axtell [00:03:58] Well thank you.

Vance Crowe [00:04:00] So you have an expertise in something that is akin to asking a comedian to be funny, which is you have an expertise in conversations and we're about to have a conversation when this happens. Do you feel pressure to, to put on the best conversation you've ever had?

Paul Axtell [00:04:16] No, I've never thought about that. I, I actually do like having a great conversation lined up in the morning. I think it puts you into kind of a positive mode, a possibility mode. So I like having this first thing in the morning. I think if I had podcasts I was gonna listen to, I would start a day pretty early with the podcast 'cause it kinda reframes how you think about the day. So, but actually I don't spend much time thinking about my own conversation. That's a good point.

Vance Crowe [00:04:51] So just so everybody has kind of a basis, you are an expert in conversation. You've written a book on it, I think you go around the country and teach about it. How does one stumble into a world where they become somebody that can teach people how to have better conversations?

Paul Axtell [00:05:09] Stumble is a good word for it. Well, I'm a chemical engineer by training, born and raised in South Dakota. And I went to work for Monsanto. So I worked for Monsanto company for 25 years. I'm a manufacturing person, engineering person. But then Monsanto in 1981 hired a hundred biotech scientists to develop Roundup resistant corn, soybeans, the growth hormone for dairy cattle. So Monsanto went out and hired these university scientists and it turns out they weren't very good at talking to each other. They actually thought that science is getting at the truth and you can say whatever you please to get at the truth. And it doesn't matter whether you take down a relationship in the process. So in fact, we're all like that. If you think about it, when you get raised to be civil, you give up some of your candor. And so you, over time you learn to be able to get back and confront and be candid and do it in a graceful way, a kind way way that doesn't tear down relationships. But we had a hundred of these biotech brilliant people and I was told to train 'em to be nice to each other.

Paul Axtell [00:06:42] And we found out that all the traditional training programs didn't work. And that was one benefit about working with these brilliant people. They were the first people that I ran into who told the truth about training, which was this is a waste of my time. And so, okay, so actually Monsanto gave me a two year sabbatical to look at all the ideas in the world that would make a difference to bright technical people so that we could get the collaboration we wanted. So that's how I stumbled into this. And I think stumbled is a good word. I mean the ideas are all out there. I fancy myself as a curator, I think you probably do too. I collect things so that other people can enjoy 'em. Like a curator in a museum. I create the thinking that bright technical people could take advantage of in their everyday lives. So,

Vance Crowe [00:07:40] So to the listener, they are not going to believe this, but I actually had literally no idea that you worked for Monsanto. I too worked for Monsanto and did somewhat similar work than what you did. I became the director of millennial engagement for Monsano and my job was to figure out if people out in the world believe that you are truly evil, what is it that you can say to them to even engender a conversation, to be able to start talking about things that are, that can at least open up the door to saying the way that you perceive things are right now may not be exactly accurate, but I literally had no idea. So you were in the era of Rob Fraley bringing in scientists like Fred Perla and Doug Salmons. These are all very, very close friends of mine.

Paul Axtell [00:08:23] Yeah, well say hello to Rob. Yeah, it was kind of interesting. I was there at the time when the whole debate about biotech was going on and Monsanto basic, so this is a big company, but most of the Monsanto leadership thought, no, the science will win out if we just show people the science that will convince them that this is okay, well we've learned dramatically that that doesn't matter. The facts doesn't matter. It's what kind of story are you putting out there. So yeah, absolutely.

Vance Crowe [00:09:01] What did you discover on your two year sabbatical? Did you come to them and say, I want to go on a two year sabbatical? Or did they come to you and say, get outta here for two years?

Paul Axtell [00:09:11] Well, I'm not sure I remember. I actually was hired by, I worked for Ernie Jaworski who hired Rob Fraley. And actually Ernie was one of my, and dear friend, he is passed away now, but I started coaching, I got interested in coaching and Ernie was one of the first people I was told to coach because Ernie was too candid with all the business people. And so I remember walking into his office and he said, okay Paul, where should we start? And I said, well Ernie, I think the starting place is I'm scared to death of you 'cause you are so candid, so confrontive, so, and you know, I wasn't raised to handle that, so let's just start there. I'm scared to death of you. So, and we became fast friends. So Ernie was working on his own interpersonal skills and then he actually asked me to coach the Rob Fraley, the Gwen Kres, that group of seven that kinda were the key managers because we were taking the Rob Fraley a year out of the university and giving them 200 people. And traditionally in a big organization, maybe after five years you get to supervise five and then after 10 years you get to manage 20.

Paul Axtell [00:10:43] So, but basically I said, you know, I don't know the answer to this, but I'll figure it out. And so I, I took every course I could find or brought in every consultant that I could find. I didn't care how far out they were, like Sufi stories, whatever it was Enneagram, anything that I could run into that would broaden my way of thinking. And then what I'm really good at is I'm really good at repackaging. So the ideas are out there. I mean the ideas are in the Bible, the ideas are in country Western song, the ideas are in Sufi stories. The question is, can you present 'em in a way that everyday people can get it and say, gosh, that's interesting. And in fact I'm very interested in common sense ideas, practical ideas, but they're not, they're not used. So you take very one very simple one, you wanna make a difference, you want to execute projects, give your word and keep it. That is it. You commit to a specific thing in time and then you deliver and you'll stand out because not many people are, at least in this country, you do not have to keep your word. Well how are you gonna run a project? You know, or how are you gonna run a farm if that guy who's supposed to deliver seed this morning when you're planning, you can't count on that person to be there with that seed.

Paul Axtell [00:12:15] So, but that's an idea that most people think, well, everybody keeps their word. No, people do not keep their word. So I like ideas like that because as soon as I, we have this conversation, you can install it. Well who in my life, who around me I can count on no matter what, they will get it done. And they're never gonna gimme an excuse for non-delivery. They're never gonna say they're busy, they're not gonna say they're on too many teams, they're not gonna, no, they're gonna say, I got it Paul. And you relax because you know they've got it. So I like ideas like that.

Vance Crowe [00:12:51] Yeah. And we live in a weird world, like coming to Monsanto was a, a jarring experience for me too because I had come from the World Bank where everything is politics, there is no such thing as the correct answer. There is only the consensus that we get people to agree to. Right? And then we go forward with that. Then when you come to a place like Monsanto, you're surrounded by people that are like, precision is all that matters. If we are not precise, we are nothing. And so now you have this like very unusual experience of being around people that they literally are incapable of saying something in order to provide for your feelings or to soften the clarity with which they're doing. And they don't understand why more people don't wanna listen to them. They told the truth when I asked a question. And yet I I've, I found that I became completely addicted to this. I, I changed who I was as a person I think because it became so valuable to me, just like you said, to be able to ask somebody for feedback and have them say that was not good or the thing that you said there was right, but you had some mistakes and so I didn't care about it at all. And then all of a sudden you're like, wow. The words that I say actually matter in a way that they never did in the world of politics.

Paul Axtell [00:14:09] Yeah. Because I think we know in the world of politics, I once happened to be on a golf round with a guy who was a political strategist who managed campaigns. And so I said, well, do you believe in negative ads? He says, of course you will not get elected if you don't do negative ads. And I said, well how do you possibly come to grips with the fact that you're asking your, whoever you're working with to lie and say things they don't believe in? Well you've gotta believe they've got something to offer if they get elected and therefore the me the ends justify the means. And I said, wow. I said, well, do you ever have anybody that you simply can't get behind? He says, yeah, once in a while we'll be so often values that I won't work on somebody's campaign. But if you think you can campaign by telling the truth and being positive and uplifting, you will lose. So that's like, okay, wow, that's not a field for me, but I can now get you've got a campaign on negative things because that's what people react to. So,

Vance Crowe [00:15:26] So how did this, how far did this carry you? You're at Monsanto, you're helping people figure out conversations. Do you feel like it was effective?

Paul Axtell [00:15:35] Well, I think you'd, yes. I left because Monsanto went through a downsizing and I also, I had a couple of very top people, Rob Bob Berra was the head of personnel at that time. I was kind of friends with Dick Mahoney, so they both retired. So I kinda lost the relationship that I remember one time when I first started doing these courses, I wasn't very good at getting the ideas across and it created a lot of mischief and people were pushing back on it. And so Bob Barett called me into his office and I figured I was gonna get shut down. And he says, Paul, do you realize I'm getting complaints about these courses you're leading? And I said, yeah, probably are. He says, well don't worry about it. If you weren't controversial, you wouldn't be making a difference. I got your back. And that's kind of the way life is. You know, if you don't have some relationship that's got your back, it's pretty hard to keep going. But I left 'cause those relationships left and then I actually, it was kind of interesting people, John Deere came to Monsanto. It was a great story. They had heard about my work about changing the culture on project teams.

Paul Axtell [00:17:10] And so they came to Monsanto and I remember the woman from John Deer name was Cindy Officer, so was the head of research and the head of engineering and me and this woman Cindy officer. And she just started with, let's just be real clear here, I want you to give me a week of Paul's time. We've got a new tractor coming up. Was the 8,000 series row crop tractor called Simar. It takes seven years to develop a new platform. We want to get it down to four years. We've heard this guy can do it, we want you to give us a week of your his time. And the head of engineering, he was an old rough guy. He says, well number one I'll say yes if you agree to interview me for a job 'cause I want you to come work here.

Vance Crowe [00:18:08] I've

Paul Axtell [00:18:09] Never, I've never seen anybody who walked in and asked for what they wanted. And they said, but it's basically up to Paul. So we'll agree if Paul agrees, she slid her booklet over to me and says, please write down your phone number a time tomorrow when I call, call you and tell me what questions I've got to answer for you to say yes. And the next day I agreed to go do this course for John Deere. So I had a number of clients like that. At the same time, Mahoney for Monsanto got onto a kick where he wanted eight to 15% returns instead of 5% returns. He's thinking, well I can get 5% in a bank folks, so I want pharmaceutical returns. So here's what we're gonna do in five years. If your business isn't making eight to 15%, I will divest it. I will sell you. And they came back, the businesses said, yeah, but you've got all this overhead that we're paying for. And he said, okay, I tell you what, I will remove 90% of the overhead and if you want it in your unit, fine, otherwise I'm cutting it. And he cut corporate training, he cut corporate treasury, he cut corporate pr 'cause he wanted those outcomes. And he says, business units, you've got it Now there's no more overhead. So in that moment I decided to, to leave because we were being downsized.

Paul Axtell [00:19:48] So anyway, I left 'cause I had other clients already lined up and I was kind of being eliminated in Monsanto. So, but the way we were I had is I had about 8,000 people. I was deeply connected to their development people. If you think about, well I kind of gotten into meetings, but if you all training courses, when people come, they don't come because they want their team to be be better. They don't come 'cause they wanna be perceived as a leader. They come for two one reason. They wanna be better dads and moms when they come into course, that's what they want. They wanna be a better brother, a better partner, a better dad, a better mom. And then they have another complaint about meetings are really, really bad here and we spend too much time in meetings. But those are the two channels that people have on their plate when they walk into a training session.

Vance Crowe [00:20:46] You are, I, I can't believe how insightful that is, but it is 100% insightful. So I was was hired to help go talk externally about the company. But I found myself doing a lot of internal things where people were saying, I wanna get along better with X, Y, and Z person. And then them being able to extrapolate because if I'm better at this relationship then all the other relationships will get better as well. But I had never put those two things together. I think you're a hundred percent correct. People deeply wanna know how do I connect with my family and, and how do I, how do I communicate the things that I feel but don't know how to put into words such that another person can actually understand me

Paul Axtell [00:21:31] Well and I think you, one of the things that bothers people is you and I do not have an ability to be this person at work and a different person when we walk in the door at night. And if you're a jerk to the people that you supervise, you're a jerk to your kids. There is. You can't turn it on and off. And when people, and people don't want to be jerks, they don't wake up in the morning saying, I'm gonna upset a bunch of people. They don't on their way in figure out who am I gonna mess with today? They for some reason in their past said this is a way to be successful. Maybe they got bullied, whatever it was, they recognize they'd like to be different, but they have no way of getting there. And I mean it's, you think, well people just, no, they're fine with being arrogant or domineering. No they're not. They just don't know how to get outta that mode. And there's nothing big enough at stake at work to force 'em through the needle to change. But you get 'em to see that, you know what, a lot of parents have teenagers who talk to 'em. There's nothing that says when they become a teenager and they get hormones and wheels that they stop talking to their parents know that's some myth. There's a lot of parents whose kids talk to 'em. And if your kid isn't talking to you, it's because of who you are.

Paul Axtell [00:23:05] You wanna change that. And you know what, along the way you'll be better person to work for.

Vance Crowe [00:23:11] Okay. You've, you've intrigued me. What is the way, what is the path to helping people get better at these things?

Paul Axtell [00:23:19] Well, so first of all, I'm gonna take a little side path here. People talk about instincts, things you do intuitively, things you see instinctively. So in every pro foot game I've ever seen, there'll be some time when the announcer's gonna say he's got a high football iq. Where's, what do you mean high football iq? Well, he can tell where the play's gonna be before it can unfold. That's not football iq. That's just somebody who's seen that play so many times, they know what's happening. So ahead of instincts that which people call, it's kind of my natural thing to do is awareness. Like all farmers, when they drive down the road, they immediately notice what kind of tractor it is, what kind of radiator it is, how much horsepower it is. Have they memorized that? No, but they've got years and years and they know exactly how that field ought to be plowed and planted. I like pheasant hunting. And do I tell myself to look for pheasants? No. But after so many years driving with my dad road hunting, I know at what time of day and what kind of field where the birds are gonna be. And that's where my eyes will go. Is that hunting iq?

Paul Axtell [00:24:53] No, that's just something drilled in by practice. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:24:57] Pattern spotting. Yeah, it's

Paul Axtell [00:25:01] Exactly. So if you look at awareness in every field, every discipline, there's seven, let's say seven factors or less. If you pay attention to that, you'll be good in putting a couple things to pay attention to. Shooting sporting clays, a couple things to pay attention to. So the experts who can train, you know what the critical variables are. Critical variables are not something to learn or memorize. They're where you put your attention. So you put your attention there and then you do it enough so that it becomes instinctive. So what's a critical variable? Put your awareness there. Practice enough so it becomes instinctive. So if we look at what instincts you and I would like to have, so empathy is kind of a buzzword out there. Well why don't you and I have empathy? 'cause we're boys, you raise little boys to play and compete. There's no empathy involved in competing. None at all. We use warlike language to teach football. There's no empathy in warlike language. Kill smash 'em, hit 'em, crush 'em. You're a coward if you don't hit that guy hard. Well, so empathy is something a lot of guys are short on. Where does empathy come from? It comes from if you, most little girls are raised to care and train.

Paul Axtell [00:26:36] Now there's clearly we've blurred those lines in a good way and there's a lot of women involved in sports and who are a lot more candid and direct than they used to be. But fundamentally for thousands of years, women train and nurture guys playing complete. So what's the number one thing with respect to the most missing piece? And here's the piece that tell you the short story. I was doing three afternoon workshops at Oregon State University. Three hour workshops, 40 people were, could be in each session. The first one was on listening, which is by far the most important critical skill, which we're gonna talk about. The second was building high performing teams and the third one was being remarkable. Those are the three workshops. 42 people signed up for listening. 30 signed up for high performing teams, which is kind of interesting. 177 people signed up for being remarkable. Why human beings are want to be seen as unique, talented, and relevant. All human beings want to be seen as unique, relevant, and talented. So what allows somebody to feel like they are relevant? Let's go back to the meeting thing or psychological safety.

Paul Axtell [00:28:10] The number one thing that allows for psychological safety is the attention of the group who you're speaking to. That's it. It's, it's all about being attentive. Now you can see in group size of 20 you're gonna get less attention because people do not manage their physicalness. They don't manage how they sit, they don't manage how they lean in. They don't manage their eye contact. And people think they can multitask and be attentive. You can't. So they bring other work, they check their phone. But when you speak there's, I used to coach a lot of people and a lot of 'em, English is their second language. And so they've got this thing called, well I wanna have more impact when I speak. And the reason I don't have any impact is my English isn't so good. But I have a quick conversation with them. Which first of all is well number one, I wouldn't worry about your English 'cause you're not worried about my Chinese and I, most of us are in awe of your English language. You do wanna be careful though because if you have a concern about your English, you might speak softer. And that gives me a second problem in listening to you is I can't quite hear you. But the reason you don't feel like people are paying attention to you is nobody's paying attention to anybody.

Paul Axtell [00:29:45] It's got nothing to do with you.

Vance Crowe [00:29:49] Yeah. I often say so people, particularly people with a second language, you know, I've worked at the World Bank, I've been around people from all over the world that are trying to compete in an English speaking world when it's their second language, like you had said. And they would say to me all the time, I wanna sound like you and I would, I would always push back on that and say, really the biggest reason that you want PE to sound like me is because you see that people are attentive to what I'm saying. And one of the hardest things I think for a non-English speaking person that's particularly grown up in a collectivistic culture or in a larger culture is that eye contact is something that's very, very difficult for them. And they don't realize that it's incredibly important for the speaker to be able to look in the eyes of the people that they're speaking to. That that you're getting this constant feedback loop. And that one of the things that I have is, you know, I grew up as the middle of seven children, so making eye contact with everybody is very easy for me. But I use that as a way of saying, are you understanding what I'm saying? Are you liking what I'm saying? And as soon as I know that this person is, then I move to that person and I move to that person. But from the outsider's perspective, they think, oh, it's just the speed with which you use word or the forcefulness with which you speak. But I think I could ratchet all of those things down to 10% of what they are. And as long as I'm making eye contact and grabbing the eye contact of other people, that's what makes people feel like you're in that flow state that you're, you're describing about having attention.

Paul Axtell [00:31:16] Yeah, I would So come back to the eye contact in a second. I think what I tell people is sincerity beats polish every time. As long as you're sincere about what you're saying, you'll communicate. In fact, if you get too polished, people will start to say, Hmm, can I believe you? The thing about eye contact and you're lucky if you were raised making eye contact, a lot of little boys weren't raised to make eye contact or certain cultures. The thing is, all you have to do is to make 10 seconds of eye contact when you first start speaking and 10 seconds of eye contact when you start listening, that's it. And then you can do what feels comfortable. It's only that initial start. And I like what you said about moving from person to person. Okay, 10 seconds of eye contact here and then 10 seconds of eye contact here. So it's not like all of a sudden I've gotta learn eye contact. No, but you can train yourself to do two 10 seconds at the beginning and then every once in a while in between. It's an interesting thing because the whole nonverbal thing is overrated. The only people who are really good at nonverbal reading are like jury consultants and maybe Israeli security who have been trained on profiling in reading people who are anxious or whatever.

Paul Axtell [00:32:51] You know, customs officials, you and I, we think that we can interpret what people are saying by how they look. And we're clueless because people don't manage how they look. They just sit the way that's comfortable. So on the other hand, in a meeting, if you lean in, make eye contact, be attentive, take everything else off the table. So you've got no other work, no smartphone. People will think, so here's the thing, attention is the equated with caring. If you pay attention to me, I make up you care. And once you make up that I care, I feel safe with you. So absolutely eye contact.

Vance Crowe [00:33:41] I I a hundred percent agree on your attention thing. I, I would push back on your nonverbals. I think that there is a, a huge amount that you gather from the way that people sit. And maybe that is the, the function that you're talking about. Maybe you're just gauging whether or not they're attentive or not. But I, I find that for example, the the mask culture that we have going on right now is extremely unsettling to me. To me, I go to the grocery store or somewhere out in public and my inability to read the facial emotions of people, which we were evolved to do. We are able to read facial expressions before we learn language. And so our, our ability to understand intent and our ability to understand the temperature that people have going on inside of them, I think is so deeply embedded that it actually is a precursor to words.

Paul Axtell [00:34:33] Well I agree with you there. It's called structural language. And you got structural language before he got representational language. So when your dad looked like that, you knew it was time to cease and desist. So you're absolutely right that what you're taking in from tone of voice, that's why sometimes video gets in the way of thinking. 'cause now I'm gonna make stuff up based on the way you look. What I'm against is that people read too much based on something. For instance, there's a traditional, well if he's got his arms crossed, he's not liking what I'm saying. No. People cross their arms to be comfortable. So at the level of, hmm, I think something's going on for you. Yes. At the level of I can tell exactly what's going on for you. No way.

Vance Crowe [00:35:31] Yeah, that I totally agree with. And you're right like that there was like a push for a while in popular television that there were people that could read the secret symbols of what's going on and be able to like intuit. I, I'm a hundred percent with you on, on that idea. And I think, you know, I spend a lot of time with the, the scientists that you were talking about and whether or not I, I often describe it as being a lot of those people are somewhere on the Asperger's spectrum. So they are hyper logical and they either do not have the emotion clouding into that logic or they intentionally push it out. But if you try and read the person that is hyper logical, their body language as the same as, you know, the, the Instagram mom that loves sharing her stories about her kids, those are like total, they're entirely different emotional languages. And so I am, I'm I'm with you a hundred percent. I just think that that's a such an interesting way that you're using to describe it is basically you're gauging attention. And that really is a self-representation of where am I at in the hierarchy here? How am I doing? Am I moving forward or am am I being pushed out? And like the, when people get on that downward slope of of oh no, people aren't paying attention to me, then they spiral out of control and they sound less and less genuine, they sound less and less confident and then they lose more and more attention.

Paul Axtell [00:36:54] Well and you're right. Now on the other side of it, if you know that the person who's speaking is taking everything personally based on how you look, well then you should manage your physicalness. So you look supportive. I remember scientists used to be sent to me before they would go talk to the board of directors of Monsanto. And if somebody was really nervous, then I would go up through my channel. I didn't know the board members and I'd say, look, this person's gonna be awesome, but he's pretty nervous so let's get a couple people when he starts speaking, nodding and smiling. So when he looks out he's seeing a supportive audience. Don't be doing other work, don't be thinking about something else. Pay attention to this person. And it always transformed it.

Vance Crowe [00:37:47] So Paul, have you used a VR headset in the last year or so?

Paul Axtell [00:37:52] No.

Vance Crowe [00:37:53] So as a communicator you might find this to be so interesting. So

Paul Axtell [00:37:57] Okay,

Vance Crowe [00:37:58] When you put on your VR headset and you're in a room, the last week I had a book club, about 20 people there and we're all in this space and all you can see are avatars. So you can't read faces. Okay? But what is different about VR than other things is if you choose the right platform, the sound changes based on am I facing you? Am I to the side of you? Am I behind you? So you have all this added layers of dimension that sound can add into this experience. And one of the things that I realized about a quarter of the way into the book club, I would not have thought of this had you not brought this up, is one of the things that happens with your avatar is if you're in the VR headset, it responds to your movement. So if you start nodding your head yes like this, you watch other people get more confident about what they're doing because they can see, ah, this person is there, they're acknowledging what I'm doing and I can feel confident even though you can't see their face. Wow, you can see this. Yep. This positive reaction and it, it creates a, a loop of positivity.

Paul Axtell [00:39:01] Yeah, I would just, I did a training class, it was only an hour a couple of weeks ago and because of bandwidth they couldn't turn on their videos. So I had like 30 people there and in the beginning I thought, wow, I'm not gonna be able to connect with this audience. I can't use any gestures, I'm not gonna know how they're doing. It wasn't long before I thought this is really nice 'cause I'm not distracted by all the distracting behavior that's out there. I can just relax and deliver the content.

Vance Crowe [00:39:43] Oh not me man, not me that is black mirror hell. So I moved from doing a ton of talks live and then I did some of them on a bunch, then got moved to online. And the ones where I don't have a face, like I can see yours now where I don't have any, it is like I'm looking at a mirror and I'm trying to talk to it. And for me, I, when I speak, I'm actually for the most part trying to get up on that edge of chaos where I don't exactly know if I'm right. And I may say something that pushes me over the line and I topple over. But that's why I want people there 'cause I wanna see, hey, how are they reacting? So for me, this juujitsu that happens when I can see people's faces is brilliant. But when I get shut off from that, it's like locking me in jail or or tying my arms up with a RAI jacket or something.

Paul Axtell [00:40:34] Well and that's the, I was thinking about doing in in-room training versus online training. And I mean the advantage is I can train people all over the world who could now travel to someplace, but the disadvantage is there's no way you get the level of connection that you do in the same room. And if I'm into a back and forth with somebody, I, if I'm in the room, I'm gonna walk up to them within six feet because they can't be nasty to me within six feet. They can take me on from 40 feet but they can't take me on from six feet because now we're physically connected. So yeah, there's, the thing is though is I'm really concerned by how much people make up based on how other people look. And I keep reminding people, you do not know what's going on for people. You don't know what happened in the last eight hours. You don't know if they had to put their parents in a rest home this week. You don't know what they're facing coming up. Yeah you can tell they're not themselves but you don't know why they're not themselves.

Vance Crowe [00:41:59] So I run this network called the Art Articulate Ventures Network and every other week we do this thing called the Circular Firing Squad, which is we choose some controversial topic, it doesn't matter what it is. And then we discuss it and it's purposefully designed to be where people are going to have a difference of opinion. But one of the things that we added in right from the very beginning is before we start talking we say Okay, what's going on with you today? Right? And I always start off like my wife was really frazzled on her way out the door today and so I had to take more time with the baby. So I got behind and I'm kind of frustrated and you hear people going around and it really does not matter what they say.

Paul Axtell [00:42:37] Yes.

Vance Crowe [00:42:38] It's just the fact that you've heard another person say, I have a life that's going on behind all of these things that I'm gonna say. And you watch then when people get into a disagreement about the thing about the topic at hand, the circular firing squad topic, there's so much more gentle with the other person understanding that there is a person behind the front of their argument. And I think that that's been a really shocking thing for me because I've watched people disagree about really serious things, but be able to maintain a level of cordial that you don't see in social media because you just assume that the perfect life of the perfect photo that you're looking at is, is where this person is coming from and not from the reality that everybody has chaos in their life.

Paul Axtell [00:43:25] I think there's something else in that situation you're talking about. It's the context for the conversation where people know we're trying to push the envelope on each other's thinking there's the wisdom of the group, which means something's gonna emerge in this conversation that not any of us brought in. Some of us might change our views, but that's less important than new thinking actually occurs in the group. So the context is set that this is to create thinking in many meetings where people get into it, that context is not set. You simply walk in thinking we're colleagues and now this is not a place to think together. This is a place to have a discussion where I'm arguing for what I already thought. So that's another piece of conversation, which is what's the context for what we're about to discuss? But we can tie it to relationships because what you're basically saying is let's get a sense of each other or sense of what's going on each other. I like to say that the quality of the conversation that occurs in a meeting is dependent on the quality of the relationships that walks into the meeting. And the quality of those relationships is based on the quality of the conversations we've had together over our past. And then the other thing is about group size. If there's five of us in the room, it will be safe 'cause we're close enough, you are not gonna do other work.

Paul Axtell [00:45:01] 'cause I would just be so, I see it in a moment. We've got physical closeness, we've got intimacy, we've got enough time where we can catch up with each other. So if you think about a lot of the meetings more, eight is the tipping point. If you have more than eight people, you're at risk of that meeting not being a high quality. So then it is what's the setup, what's the context? So that we're in the conversation as friends and colleagues and now let's argue, I had a French engineer who said, you know what's best about us is we argue like hell and then we go have a beer. Well one of the things we've lost, at least in my experience, we don't go have a beer afterwards anymore. People head home to their families and sometimes particularly when you've had a difficult conversation, you should go have a beer. So

Vance Crowe [00:46:00] 100%. I mean I, I can remember I was running a group and it, I was required to add more people into this meeting. I was always kinda like, I like about a seven, eight person meeting. But the, the group had to be about 20. And I would have people in these meetings that would come in and they'd open up their laptop and they'd start typing away. And so I would just jot them a note, why don't you go ahead and leave? And man in corporate culture telling somebody to leave because they're on their computer. It took me a little while to figure out, you gotta find a more tactful way to do this. But I think it's entirely true because when one person sits there and opens up their computer, it says, my time more valuable than all of your time. And in particular, if they're just waiting for their turn to talk and then they stop and say something and then they go back to it. But it's to your point about the attention. But then also nobody wants to go grab a beer with the person that just sat there typing on their computer while everybody else was hammering away on things. And if they did that, that's probably where all the work would get done was while you're having that beer after the fact.

Paul Axtell [00:47:05] Yes. In particular the person you don't wanna do anything else is the Rob Fraley. You want Rob Fraley to be there full attention doing no other work, no side conversations. Because when he's inattentive people really take it personally and you want his thinking. So I kinda a segue, I don't want the Rob Fraley leading their own meetings. I want them listening intently to every person that speaks a, so they can add the perspective that needs to be added that the only Rob Fraley would have. Or they can make a mental note of, okay, I need to give Vance a little bit feedback later 'cause I'm developing these people and then they need to be able to say, here's what I'm taking away from the conversation. 'cause people always wanna know what the top person is taking away from the conversation, which is another missing piece. We kind of talked about ideas is rare that anybody says, I appreciate the time we had together. Here's where I'm taking away from our conversation. I've only seen one person do this in my whole life. He's a, he's a client at Oregon State University. His name is Will. And if you go to coffee with Will at the end of coffee, he's gonna say, Paul, thank you for making time for me. I know you're busy. Here's a couple things I'm taking away from our time together today.

Paul Axtell [00:48:37] And he's gonna tell you very specific things that he's taking away from the conversation. It validates the relationship and it validates the conversation.

Vance Crowe [00:48:48] You're speaking my language here Paul. Like I, so I have a mentor, he's a hundred years old that one of the, the thing that solidified our relationship was, I think it was maybe the fourth time that we'd ever gotten together. And the next morning he calls me and he says, Vance, I was going through my notes from our conversation last night and I wanted to go through these things with you. And I don't think I had ever felt as gratified and as humbled in my entire life as somebody had a conversation with me. Then after I left they jotted down some notes and now they wanna talk about it. And so I started adding that into my life. Hey, I'm going through those notes that I wrote down about our conversation and you watch what it does to somebody. It makes them feel like, hey, when I spend my time thinking through an idea with Vance, it was time well used. He is impacted by the words that I'm saying. So I'm going to trust him more that I can, I can say more and have more impact.

Paul Axtell [00:49:46] Yeah, and let's put it back in the meeting context. So we have lots of young people, project leaders present to leadership teams. They spend two days working on a slide deck. They come in, then we only give them 15 minutes, which means you can't have a conversation, they can only present information. And so they do this presentation and then the top person, good, thank you. Now what if the top person said thank you, let me tell you the three things I'm taking away from your presentation. I was totally unaware that that was going on. Thank you. Number two, that's an idea I think that some other factories need. And with your permission, I'm gonna give them your name so they can touch base with you. And number three, I knew we needed to do something about that, but I'm pretty clear now we're gonna do something about that. Now you can either say good find, good job, or here's the three things I'm taking away from your presentation. Wow. I was, we were talking about body language. The story came up as I was listening to you. Oregon State University got a new president. His name was Paul Risser. Brilliant guy. He is passed away now. And I was asked to lead the leadership team about 30 people and I'd not met Dr. Risser before. And I'm up at the front of the table and Dr. Risser is sitting right to my left. So we started going through, setting up the meeting and the agenda and I finally said, group, I'm sorry, I need to have a quick conversation with the president here.

Paul Axtell [00:51:26] I said, Dr. Richard, you know, every time I look over at you, it looks like you don't like what I'm saying and that I'm not doing this well and I can no longer think because every time I see you, it's like he says, Paul, first of all, this is how I look when I'm thinking and if I have a problem with what you're saying, I will tell you we're good. Well I said, okay, good, great. And then the group said, you know, we've been worrying about this guy for six months because he always looks like that. But none of us ever said, Paul, are you upset? Are you not liking it? So this whole thing about body language can be misleading unless I can check with you.

Vance Crowe [00:52:18] Oh, a hundred percent. That's another big skill that I developed probably at Monsanto, which was to check, Hey, it looks like you are not in agreement with what I'm saying. Is that right? And they'll be like, oh no, I was just, I was just thinking that's just, yeah.

Paul Axtell [00:52:30] And

Vance Crowe [00:52:31] I mean like my wife is an aerospace engineer, right? Her face is serious almost at all times. And so it took me a long time of saying like, Hey, I'm gonna check in with you. And then all of a sudden, and you see it like she's embarrassed, right? She's embarrassed that like, oh, I didn't mean to send that signal. Was I sending that to other people? But it's, it's a great skill and I have never had anyone be upset at me because I checked in with what I was observing. And you maybe think at first this is gonna be something that's gonna upset him. But e everybody's like, oh no, this is a chance for me to now be more specific about what it is that I'm interpreting and I'm happy to share it.

Paul Axtell [00:53:09] Yeah. Reminds me of another story I was working with. It was for a John Deere place and there's a bunch of welders up in North Dakota. They willed some kinds of things. And on the first day of class I got this question I never had before in my life. It says, Paul, what do you think about smiling? There was this great big old burly guy, what do you think about smiling? And I said, well, I think that's a good thing. I think people like to be around people who smile. And we kind of ended there. Next question the next day, Paul, you never really answered that question about smiling, whether we should do it or not. And I said, well, okay, now where's this coming from? 'cause I've taught this class for 35 years and then 30,000 people never, nobody's ever asked me about smiling before. Well, we're taking a Dale Carnegie course and they're telling us we've gotta work on smiling more, smiling more. I said, well here's the problem. If you're four years old and you're a girl and you smile, what do your parents tell you?

Vance Crowe [00:54:12] You're so pretty

Paul Axtell [00:54:13] And you got a beautiful smile. If you're a little boy and you got a smile on your face, what is your dad gonna say?

Vance Crowe [00:54:21] What's wrong with you? Get, get

Paul Axtell [00:54:22] What's wrong with you. Take that smirk off your face. What are you up to? So pretty soon there goes smiling. And now you're 45 years old. I don't know if you're going to be having that same ability to smile as if, no, I don't think you should tell a little boy he's got a beautiful smile. I think you should say, Hey, I just love it when you smile. I just love it when your face lights up.

Vance Crowe [00:54:50] Well, and it's cross-cultural too. So I, when I was working at the World Bank, I used to smile all the time. And I had a woman that was from Russia who's very, very direct Natasha. And she, she told me like, it seems like you're trying to trick us. You smile

Paul Axtell [00:55:04] All

Vance Crowe [00:55:05] The time. Yeah. And I, I was really shocked by that. The Chinese love a smiling person. It's like that, it's like warm and they can get close to 'em. But then the person that's from Russia thinks, what are you trying to do here? This doesn't seem right. Something's off here. So smiling and all of those, to your point, the emotional things that you put on yourself is deeply cultural and it's all learned. And then our ability to interpret it is varies by wild degrees.

Paul Axtell [00:55:31] Yeah. Good. So anyway, that's a little bit of a sidetrack, but so

Vance Crowe [00:55:34] Paul, I have a question for you because we have a surprisingly similar skillset. And I think you may actually be one of the only people that I've ever met that is further down the path than I am. And I have to ask you, when you look back on your life, you won't have built buildings, you won't have built tractors, you won't have launched rockets into the air. How are you marking the value that you've put into the world as an ethereal thing? You're talking about teaching people to talk, which as soon as it's out of their mouth, it's gone.

Paul Axtell [00:56:09] Well, good question that. It's interesting. I have a side conversation. So I've only done courses for clients in organizations, but I've just been interacting with a couple women who have taken my classes on LinkedIn and they convinced me I should do some public classes for the world 'cause they think the ideas are so needed. But anyway, I can tell you a hundred, 200 stories about individuals. So I just give you a couple. This is a Montana gentleman who we do the listening exercise and basically we train people not to speak, no interrupting, no speaking, just let people think. Because the listening piece is people don't feel heard. And we've got listening as following and comprehending. No, that's not listening, that's following and comprehending listening is that you have the experience of being heard. And you can only do that if you stay out of the conversation. And if you stay outta the conversation, it's like people are an onion. They'll just peel back layer after layer. So this gentleman says, I went home and my daughter who's 22 is moving out 'cause we just can't get along. It's one in the morning. She's taking her last box to the car and I'm in the kitchen and I said, Hey, do you wanna talk? And she says, what do we have to talk about?

Paul Axtell [00:57:44] And he said, whatever you wanna talk about, I'll just listen. He said four hours later she asked if she could stay and not move out 'cause he had learned to stay out of the conversation. And another one is there's a, I had a dad who had a, I dunno how old the son was, three or four. And the son stuttered. And so the dad one spent time with him. So he'd go home, pull out his laptop, collect catch up on email while his son would play. And during class he got no, when you're attentive, you're not doing anything else, you're just there. So he went home, didn't put on his laptop, just sat on the floor and watched his kid play. And the kid started talking and he stuttered at first. And then when that kid got that, his dad wasn't going anywhere and his dad was not gonna help him finish his sentences and his dad was not gonna help him find the right word. His dad was not gonna, the kid started talking nonstop with no stuttering.

Vance Crowe [00:59:00] I believe that for sure.

Paul Axtell [00:59:02] Whereas before you can make up, we don't know what's going on, but the kid's trying to get his attention of his dad away from the computer. When his dad looks up, the kid thinks he's gonna talk real fast because his dad's gonna look away all of a sudden, nope, no place to get to. His dad is just gonna be there taking his time and the kid relaxes and start talking. So I could tell you hundreds of those kinds of stories and that's kind of why I do it. It's like, you know, there's, I saw some research Vance that said 25% of the people in the world don't have anybody to listen to them. How lonely can that be to not have somebody to go to, to be listened to?

Vance Crowe [00:59:52] I often say one of the, the skills that I teach is mirroring, right? So after somebody, you're in a, in a difficult situation and people imagine, I have to respond to what you said, but I often say like you don't understand that most people go most of their lives having never had a single person ever listen to them. Yeah. That every time they go to speak, somebody is pushing back against what they're saying. They're arguing with it, they're tussling with it, but they're not actually listening. And it is a superpower to all you have to do is just listen to what somebody said and then when they're done and they take that pause, what I'm hearing you say is that you're really struggling with this idea and you're frustrated and you think that I'm not contributing. Is that right? And you watch people, it, I, I often describe it as like you think when you go to do mirroring, it's like you've taken a hat and you've put a rabbit in front of them in the hat and then you're gonna pull it out and they're gonna know. But nobody ever notices that you're mirroring because it is so incredibly enriching and feeling of comfort to have somebody repeat back what you heard them say, what they heard you say that, that it builds a bond almost instantly.

Paul Axtell [01:01:01] Yeah. I'm gonna, I'm actually working at a more basic, but it does remind me, one of the things I did in the sabbatical was six weeks of neurolinguistic programming where you did pacing and leading and mirroring. So most listening is called active listening, paraphrasing, summarizing, reflecting back, okay, there's a piece more powerful, which is doing nothing with what they say. Just taking it in and then saying, what else? Because when you reflect something back, which is a very powerful move, you are directing where the conversation goes next. 'cause it's gonna go consistent with what you reflected back when you say what else? Wide open where they might take it same way. One of my favorite questions, so this is if we talk about conversation, talking about sports does not matter. Talking about what, maybe if you're a farmer and you're planting talking about the weather matters, but for the most part we're in conversations about the weather. 'cause we, we just have the superficial stuff. But if we could get to this question, okay Vince, what's your story? You can go wherever you wanna go with that and if you feel safe and you know I'm attentive and we got no place to get to.

Paul Axtell [01:02:36] I remember working with a bunch of people who called on financial advisors and they were saying, well how do I connect with somebody I don't know? And I said, well what do you do? And they decided to go in and they have these brochures and pamphlets and they always have an idea to sell. You know, so they've got their materials around that idea and they walk in, how you doing? How's business going? And I said, what do you think? They think when you, they see that stuff on the table, they know this is a sales pitch and you're just waiting for the right moment to open that up. I said, here's how I would do it. Now I'm not, I don't know your field, but here's how I'd walk in with nothing other than a blank notepad and say, I appreciate you met with me and are taking time with me. I'd love to work together, but who knows whether we're a good fit. So how about you just tell me what you keep, keeps you up at night and what you're thinking about and just tell me your story. What else, what else, what else? At some point, because connection occurs when somebody's sharing something that means something to them and they're being listened to in an attentive intent fashion. And when you're telling me your story, it matters to you.

Paul Axtell [01:04:07] And if I'm doing nothing else other than taking it in, we will connect. We can talk about football for an hour and not be connected. So, but I like the reflective question that's very, very powerful. But I want people to also have the ability to simply say, okay, what else?

Vance Crowe [01:04:31] Paul, I am astounded at this conversation and my executive producer, Ben Anderson, who's the guy that found you was spot on yet again, I'm gonna go out and read your books. Okay, but if other people wanted to find your book, how would they find it?

Paul Axtell [01:04:49] Well, if they go to my website, paul xl.com, you'll find 10 par things to say to your kids, which is these ideas in the con in the context of raising kids. The find meetings matter, which is these ideas in the context leading meetings, if you go to Amazon, you can also find make meetings matter, which is a one hour version. So the meetings matter is 80,000 words. It's kind of like that's the bird version. You can look up any bird in that book and it'll find it. Then the one hour reads, it's what people like. You can go to source books or Amazon, you can find that there. Also on my website, you'll find something called being remarkable, which is basically, I think, I think it's possible to be really, really good. I think I love, if you had Jeff Colvin on, you should get number one, he's from South Dakota, but he wrote two books. Talent is overrated and human beings are underrated. I absolutely believe that. There's a few genius people like the woman, young woman who did the poem at the inaugural, the poet laureate genius, the women who did the mathematics for in the movie Hidden Figures, genius we're not geniuses. In fact, tiger Woods says he's not more talented than anybody else, but he got 10,000 hours of practice under the eye of somebody knew how to teach golf before he was 12 years old.

Paul Axtell [01:06:34] So I really believe it's not about talent, it's about three things, attitude, preparation, and practice. And you can be really good. And it doesn't take much to get ahead of most people. 'cause most people are not working on anything. So in fact, I'll give you a perspective. When you talk about perspective, the most important perspective in life, bar none, is treat every moment, every person, every conversation, everything you do as though it matters, you do that. You'll, because most people are doing enough to get by going through the motions. You treat every person you're with. Like they are the only person in the world right now. People will love you.

Vance Crowe [01:07:20] I, so there's this concept in kind of modern Twitter parlance called NPCs non-player characters. And what it's describing is you walk around in the world and there are people that are just like in a video game when you walk in to buy more armor or more weapons, it's a character in the video game that's there, but they don't have any role in the game. You could take them out and put 'em back in. They're a non-player character, okay?

Paul Axtell [01:07:45] And

Vance Crowe [01:07:45] So they, they refer to people as NPCs. And one of the things that I realized is that everyone is an NPC until you pay attention to them. And as soon as you pay attention to them, they're no longer an NPC. They are a real person that impacts your game, that you impact their game. And that that there's so much aliveness there that, that you have no idea what happens. But that that really, in effect, it's almost magical because you can walk around and touching what you thought was an NPC and realize this is an entire universe. This person has multitudes inside of them that are, that are fascinating and interesting.

Paul Axtell [01:08:24] Yeah, I, you remind me and then I clear you probably need to get up, but I was in Ireland on some kind of trip and I was out walking and came over this beautiful piece of water and there's a old guy sitting on this bench and so I just walked up and I said, this is pretty spot. And he says, yeah it is. And I say, did you come here often? Every day? So then I said, what's your story? And that guy talked nonstop for an hour.

Vance Crowe [01:09:04] Sometimes that's all it takes. Just ask. And you have no idea what will come up. Well Paul, I, speaking of talking, I will have you on to talk anytime you are an expert of which I have much to learn from. This was an incredibly enriching conversation. I know my audience is gonna love it and I will definitely include your book and how to get ahold of you in the show notes. So thank you so much for coming on, Paul.

Paul Axtell [01:09:26] Oh, you're very welcome. Take care.