Summary

We live in an age of unprecedented communication tools, yet misunderstandings and conflicts online seem more common than ever. In this episode, we learn from Professor Andrew Brodsky, a management professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of "PING: The Secrets of Successful Virtual Communication." Drawing from his personal experience with isolation due to illness and his extensive research, Professor Brodsky shares the science behind effective virtual communication. You'll discover his PING framework for better online interactions, learn why we consistently overestimate our ability to convey emotion through text, and get practical advice for avoiding the most common digital communication pitfalls. This episode will help you become not just a better communicator online, but a more thoughtful and gracious person in all your virtual interactions.

About Our Guest

Dr. Andrew Brodsky is a management professor at The University of Texas at Austin in the McCombs School of Business.

By implementing his own research-driven methods, he has won multiple research and teaching awards, including Poets & Quants Best 40 Under 40 MBA Professors in the world. Andrew’s expertise on virtual interactions and organization communication led him to publish the book Ping: The Secrets of Successful Virtual Communication and form the Ping Group. His goal is to help organizations leverage research-based approaches that will enable their employees to improve all types of interactions and communication.

Andrew has consulted, conducted training, and given keynote talks around the world. His research on workplace interactions has been published in a variety of peer-reviewed journals, and he has been regularly quoted for his expertise in major media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, The Economist, and Reuters.

Useful Links

Andrew Brodsky - Personal & Book Website: https://abrodsky.com

Ping Group Consulting: https://pinggroup.org/

Expert Tips for Better Virtual Communication: https://www.pcma.org/expert-tips-for-better-virtual-communication/

Pleasant Pictures Music

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I had a advisor in my research career early on who loved

to use ellipses at the end of emails.

So that, dot, dot, dot.

And it was like, "Hey Andrew, thanks for this dot, dot, dot." And as a low powered

student, I was like, he hates what I did.

Like this dot dot dot.

He is like, really?

But eventually I like talked to this professor who was like, "Oh no, I

always do that, because I mean, to be continued, you know, it's not that

like dot, dot, dot really?" And I was like, oh yeah, now it makes sense.

Aaron - Narration: Hi, I'm Aaron Miller and this is How to Help, a

podcast about having a life and career with meaning, integrity, and impact.

This is season three, episode seven: How to Be a Person Online.

Speaking of being online, I hope you'll take a moment to do two online things

that best help this podcast to grow.

First of all, will you share an episode with a friend?

And then secondly, will you leave us a review?

Those two things take only a few minutes of your time, but it

makes a huge difference for us.

Thank you for supporting the show.

In a previous episode, the interview I did with Judge Griffith, I shared some of

George Washington's farewell address to the country after his time as president.

I hope you'll indulge me as I share another Washington

story in the winter of 1776.

The spark of American rebellion was on the verge of being extinguished.

After a shocking military success in Boston that drove out British

forces, general Washington faced a string of humiliating

defeats in and around New York.

The only real successes that his forces could claim then were the surprisingly

effective retreats that kept the rebellion from experiencing total collapse.

Although widely revered, Washington had to watch his reputation as a

military leader slide into serious doubt even among his closest advisors.

One of those was Joseph Reed, a lieutenant colonel who had been an aid

to Washington through multiple battles.

In a letter to General Charles Lee, who is second in command of the Continental Army.

Colonel Reed praised Lee for his military accomplishments and simultaneously

criticized the devastating losses that had happened under Washington's command.

Reed specifically criticized Washington's indecisiveness saying to General

Lee, "Oh, General, an indecisive mind is one of the greatest misfortunes

that can befall an army. How often I've lamented it for this campaign."

Lee wrote back to Reed a few days later in full agreement about General

Washington's flaws and even compared them to "stupidity or want of personal

courage." Lee wasn't calling Washington a dunce or a coward, but he was saying his

indecisiveness made him just as bad as one

Lee's letter though was delivered to Washington himself by mistake,

who opened it believing that it was war correspondence and

not a personal communication.

It's not hard to imagine how devastating it was for General Washington to see what

his commanders really thought of him.

Perhaps you can relate to this story.

Has there ever been a time when you sent a delicate text to the wrong person?

Have you ever had an email misunderstood?

Have you ever been on a Zoom call when someone forgot to mute

themselves in an embarrassing way?

We have at our disposal today the fastest, cheapest, easiest modes of

communication ever before put into human hands, and it's no wonder that

we're prone to make mistakes with them.

Those mistakes sometimes might just end in a small mishap, but they

might also lead to bitter conflict.

Look at the rancor that spreads online, even just from a poorly drafted tweet,

I thought it would be worthwhile to learn how to communicate better

online, and so I've called on the wisdom of an expert to help us do that.

So my name is Andrew Brodsky.

I am a management professor at the McComb School of Business at

the University of Texas at Austin.

I research virtual communication, the way we interact at work, as

well as a few ancillary topics like how we spend our time at work.

Aaron - Interview: Tell me what drew you into studying virtual communication

in particular as a field of study and a, and a professional passion for you.

When I was 16 years old, I was very suddenly and surprisingly

diagnosed with a bad case of leukemia.

Blood cancer.

I ended up needing bone marrow transplant.

So basically the isolation everyone did during COVID, I experienced

that a couple decades ago.

For the month after bone marrow transplant, you're in

one of these isolation rooms

where people can only come in if they wear gowns, gloves, and masks

pretty much from head to toe.

So I got this experience pretty early on of often having to

communicate with people at a distance.

Luckily came through in one piece, but I was left with a long-term

immune deficiency where I'm not able to produce my own antibodies.

As a function of that, I've had to be much more careful than many.

So when they say, oh, unless you're immune compromised, it's not a big issue.

Unfortunately, I fall into that bucket.

So yet again, it's a topic that's really important.

As I was began studying it during my PhD, I realized it wasn't just important

to me, it was important to everyone.

Regardless of where you work from, whether it's a home or the office,

we're all using these tools, email, instant messaging, video calls, as

now a core way of communicating.

So being able to put together a book where I can relay this information for me seemed

like a really meaningful thing to do.

Aaron - Narration: Professor Brodsky is the author of the book PING, the Secrets

of Successful Virtual Communication.

I read his book earlier this year and I thoroughly enjoyed it, and so we're going

to spend some time learning from the science of how to be a better communicator

and really just a better person online.

Let's start with what I think is the most common pitfall.

We've all heard of nonverbal communication that comes from things like body

language or facial expressions.

You've probably cited the widely used statistic that only 7% of communication

comes from the actual words that we say.

Now, this research is often taken out of context, but the principle

is true that we communicate volumes through things other than our words.

Perhaps the best evidence of this is how strong nonverbal cues

are for virtual communication.

You don't even need to be there in person to be misunderstood.

Aaron - Interview: What are some examples or what some advice you have for how

to manage the virtual nonverbal cues in a way that helps avoid conflict?

BEcause I feel like we constantly misunderstand each other online,

and I think a lot of it has to do with nonverbal cues.

Not even what's written, but sort of how it appeared.

Nonverbal behavior in virtual communications is one of

the things that people often miss and they don't realize because they

think it's not face-to-face, so it's really just what the words I'm typing.

But research has shown that there's a lot of nonverbal behavior that we're

not realizing we're sending even in the least rich modes like email

and instant message text messaging.

Aaron - Narration: Richness as used by Brodsky here means communication that uses

multiple methods and senses all at once.

An in-person conversation is rich, where a text message is less so.

There's lots of knowledge that can be gained to understand how

does their nonverbal behavior come off, whether it's typos, emojis,

punctuation, what time of day you respond.

There are all these different cues that are important in our communication.

But secondarily, one of the tips I like to give is related to our focus

when we tend to interact virtually.

When we are interacting virtually, we're generally just looking at

the text of email, at best, maybe we're looking at a square of the

person's video feed on your screen.

So it's really easy to be more self-focused.

Whereas when you're in person, there's someone standing right in front of

you it's hard to forget they're there.

You're thinking about how they're going to react immediately.

But when you're just communicating from behind a screen, we're kind

of in our own world a little bit.

As a result, we often don't take that extra step to think about how might the

other person interpret this language.

Aaron - Narration: People aren't computers.

We send and receive communication emotionally, not only rationally.

It might be a mild feeling attending or message like confidence, fatigue,

or encouragement, but emotion is hard to convey through text alone.

Our mild intentions might get misread as stronger ones like arrogance,

exasperation, or condescension.

This is a common source of unintended conflict.

So for instance, some research shows that when

we write emails with emotion, so whether it's sarcasm or anything

else, it seems really clear to us.

And participants in these studies rate the odds that someone else

will correctly predict the emotion they intended is very high.

In reality, people are really bad at interpreting those

messages and are generally wrong.

So people are really overconfident about their ability to relay

emotion in these messages.

The reason being is that when you're typing the message, you hear the

emotion in your head as you're typing it, so it seems really clear.

But on the recipient side, they're not hearing the same emotion you are.

They're coming in with a different set of information, assumptions, that

makes them hear something different.

So one of the pieces of advice that comes outta this research is when you

have a message like this, they found that when they had participants read

the message out loud in the completely opposite tone that they intended--so

for instance, if, if it's sarcastic, read is serious, if it's serious read is

sarcastic-- those participants suddenly realized that their message might not

have been as clear as they thought.

So taking that little extra step to engage in this kind of perspective taking can

be incredibly useful, especially when the person's not standing in front of you.

Aaron - Narration: Professor Brodsky just mentioned perspective taking, and that's

part of the core framework in his book.

"Ping" isn't just a reference to the sound your phone makes when a text arrives.

In this case, it's an acronym for how we can improve our virtual communication.

So the P is for perspective taking.

The I is for initiative.

The N is for nonverbal.

The G is for goals.

So perspective taking, just as an example of what this means is that

when we're interacting virtually, we're often tend to be much more self-focused

because we're just looking at a screen.

Even if the other person's face is there, it's a pretty small portion

of your screen as opposed to them standing up right in front of you.

So for instance, as a supervisor, if you send a message with a joke to

a subordinate about a work project.

The subordinate, who's really anxious in that situation, may

feel that it's condescending or may feel like they messed up somehow.

Where the supervisor is trying to lighten the mood.

So actually putting yourself in the other person's shoes can be incredibly useful.

Aaron - Narration: A weakness that I have in perspective taking

is when I'm grading homework.

When I'm in that mode, I'm looking for ways that the assignment could be better,

and so my brain is focused on flaws.

The result is that my initial feedback could be especially

harsh for students to read.

To me, it just feels like I'm writing down what needs improvement.

But to my students, it would end up coming across as hypercritical or unfeeling.

It's taken practice from me to make sure that I compliment what they did

well and I couch my criticisms in a way that I'd want to receive them.

And so it's something that I'm still working on.

This extra effort in grading is where we see Brodsky's second element, initiative.

The I, for initiative.

It's, it's valuable to think about what's missing in a given mode of

communication and how can we add it back.

So there were some interesting studies in negotiation that found

that negotiators who negotiated over instant messaging, as opposed to in

person, tend to build less rapport, trust, and do as well in negotiating.

But those negotiators who took the initiative to have a short five

minute phone call where they just kind of socialized, the authors

called it schmoozing, uh, right before the negotiation, and then

after the phone call, they did negotiate over instant message.

Those people who took that extra initiative ended up building more

rapport and trust and improving their own negotiation outcomes compared to

those who just went straight to instant messaging and didn't take that initiative.

Aaron - Narration: What I love about initiative is that it can make us

stand out at a time when most people communicate in the default, easy ways.

If you've ever just called someone, rather than hashing out a conversation

via text, that was a moment of initiative.

Also, initiative can work the other way too.

Instead of a rambling conversation, you can take the time to craft an

email so it has the complete thought.

Keep it compact, but use headings and other things that make the

email easy to read and follow.

That kind of effort reflects initiative too.

Initiative is part of how we deal with the nonverbal traps that we'd otherwise miss.

The N is nonverbal.

And this is valuable because we send so much information over virtual

communication, we don't realize.

So with text-based communication, there's emoji, there's typos,

there's exclamation marks.

But even with video communication, it's not the same as in person.

There's a number of studies that show the importance of eye contact during

video interviews, but that's a little bit awkward over video because often our

web camera is not in the same location as the person's face we're looking at.

So, you know, we're looking at their face so it's, we think we're keeping

eye contact, but to them it looks like we're just looking off screen.

They don't know if we're reading from a script or checking email or

just playing games on our phone.

So it's important to understand how things might be interpreted or happen differently

in virtual as opposed to in person.

Aaron - Narration: These three insights lose their value if we don't

pay attention to the final piece of Brodsky's PING framework goals.

And lastly, G's for goals.

It would be much easier if I could just say there's one

best mode of communication.

You know, you should do everything in person, or you

should do everything over email.

It would make for a very short book though, and

unfortunately it's not the case.

Aaron - Interview: Yeah.

So for instance, in this area of research,

let's talk about video calls.

Cameras on or cameras off: this is like a nice debate that lots

of organizations are having.

Should we have cameras on or cameras off meetings?

And the answer is, it depends on your goals.

So if it's an early stage relationship, you don't really know the person.

And your goal is to build trust and to make a good impression, having cameras on

can be really useful because we tend to trust people who we feel familiar with.

Alternatively, there's research on Zoom fatigue or video conferencing

fatigue that shows that being on video can be really exhausting.

Staring at yourself, seeing you mess up nonverbal behavior, it's just

draining and it can cause burnout.

So if your goal is to enable the people in your meeting to have more focus, to

be more productive and not be fatigued, then cameras off can be better.

Aaron - Narration: Here's an example of where goals matter.

Less rich modes like email can help us to communicate if there's a likelihood

of our emotions getting the best of us.

Emails, texts, and instant messages are a way for us to

temper the way we communicate.

So there's some good research, uh, that shows that in

situations where there's likely to be some degree of competition, but

not necessarily extreme competition, less rich modes can be a little bit

better because it masks everyone's nonverbal behaviors that show they don't

necessarily like each other as much.

Aaron - Interview: Oh yeah.

And the idea is it kind of keeps everyone professional.

They don't see them like frowning at each other as much and

it hides some of that stuff.

Aaron - Interview: Is, is there advice about how dialing the richness up or

down just helps people treat others with more fairness or more kindness?

So when it comes to stereotypes and biases and

communication, they impact most everyone.

You don't necessarily have to be an underrepresented minority.

There's research that shows that men who are shorter earn less money

than men who are taller, that people are more attractive, earn more money

than people who are less attractive.

And we all kind of have different assumptions about

people based on how they look.

Some might be helpful to them, some less so.

So there's this question about which mode do we use to reduce these kind

of biases and stereotypes when they might work against us or others.

So the research basically kind of leads to a sort of framework.

The first question that you have is.

Are the differences known or not?

If the differences are not known.

So you don't know if someone's a man or woman or black or white or whatever

else, and your goal is to reduce stereotypes and bias, then obviously

using less rich modes is best because you can mask the fact that anyone's

even different from each other.

That said, that's a fairly limited set of circumstances, usually potentially

related to job interviews, because after that, everyone knows each

other's name, knows each other.

It's hard to hide the fact that people are different.

You can usually tell from people's names and you've

usually seen them at least once.

Aaron - Narration: Richer communication has the power to reduce our

biases because we get to know the people beyond their categories.

It's harder to judge someone unfairly if you know them as a

person instead of just as a gender, a faith, a race, or an orientation.

Less rich modes though might help some people feel more confident in being

themselves and act contrary to the stereotypes that are applied to them.

A blessing and a curse of virtual communication is that we're more

comfortable with being ourselves when we have a screen between us.

There's another thing about biases and stereotypes is it

not just impacts our views of others.

It impacts if we fall into one of those categories, how we behave.

So there's a certain way that society often expects men to behave about

how women to behave, et cetera.

So for instance, negotiation is a topic that often comes up and a negotiation

in many types of negotiation, albeit not all of them, being competitive and

being aggressive can be beneficial.

But that's a type of behavior that's generally seen as better

fitting for men than women, who are supposed to be more communal.

And what research shows is that if you're trying to have women feel

more comfortable being aggressive and competitive in negotiations where it

would benefit themselves, it's better to do that over less rich modes.

The reason being is that when other people don't see us, when we don't have

our nonverbal behaviors on display, when our differences feel a little bit

more masked and anonymous in some ways, we feel more comfortable being free.

We feel more comfortable not feeling the need to stick by

society's expectations of us.

We're less focused on how other people might punish us for

varying from those expectations.

Aaron - Narration: A common social expectation is small talk, and it's

one of those things that we all do, but we all also complain about.

The research shows that small talk has a lot more value than we give it

credit for, though, value that can be lost in virtual communications.

Small talk is one of the topics that there's always a lot

of debate about, and many people hate small talk because it feels unproductive.

And they're not wrong.

It takes up time from your reading.

It takes up text in your email.

It might feel irrelevant.

But on the other side of that, there's an important use to small talk.

It's helps us build trust.

It helps us to get to know each other.

It helps us to take down the barriers between work and life, so

we feel like we're actually having a relationship with that person.

So by taking a little bit of extra step and adding in a couple sentences about,

you know, your weekend, asking a personal question to the other person, can be a

really great way to help build trust.

I'm not saying you want to go the too much information route, the TMI route, and have

like a 10 paragraph long diatribe about your recent vacation in the email, because

you know that's going to bother everyone.

But just trying to sneak a little bit extra back in, if your goal is to

build trust, can be a really useful thing to do because it helps remind

them that there's a human on the other side of this communication as well.

Aaron - Narration: You remember my episode with Debby Tucker?

Part of the reason she's been so persuasive in her work to end domestic

violence is that she's excellent at this kind of trust building communication.

I kid you not, the emails that she sent to arrange our interview were frankly

as delightful as she is in person.

She signed off on one of them to tell me she had to go fold some laundry.

It's a gift to be as disarming as she is, even when just online.

I think the same things that keep us from doing virtual small talk also

keep us from more genuine gestures, like giving unsolicited compliments.

It's easy to worry that will be seen as insincere.

Aaron - Interview: What advice do you have for overcoming that worry and

concern that our, our good gesture will be read opposite to our intentions?

When it comes to how human brains work, we're generally much more

concerned about losses than the gains.

So we tend to focus on how awkward it might be to reach out to someone we

haven't connected with in a while, or how awkward it might be to say something

nice to someone, or a kind word or kind gesture, as opposed to how they

might feel about it and the warmth they might get by experiencing that.

What I generally recommend to people who are feeling this hesitation to remember

the, the last time someone did something nice for them that they completely

unexpected, that was unexpected for them.

You know, the last time someone from earlier in their life tried to reconnect

with them just to hear how they were doing and remember, how did you feel then?

And I'm guessing you felt pretty good and focusing on that as opposed

to that first awkward step of like, should I reach out to them or not,

can help get you past that hurdle.

Aaron - Narration: Virtual conversations aren't just about

complimenting people or building trust.

Sometimes we have to use online tools to deliver bad news or give tough criticism.

Brodsky has great advice for those moments.

So when it comes to frank feedback, the first step that I

generally recommend is to think about, well, how would I want to receive this?

There were some stories that went viral during the last couple years of layoffs

of these things going really badly.

One of the ones that stands out to me was an organization that I won't

name, supposedly was doing layoffs, and the manager was laying someone off

and the person being laid off didn't want to turn on their camera, but the

manager insisted the person turn on their camera in order to be laid off.

And like, here's a good example of a lack of empathy, really backfiring.

Like do you really need their camera to be on to fire them?

And you can't blame the person being laid off.

Like if you're, you want to maintain some dignity.

You don't want to necessarily be seen crying in front of your manager.

Aaron - Narration: In the age of AI, the temptation is incredibly

strong to hand over the hard work of difficult or even mundane

communication to tools, like ChatGPT.

There are already ridiculous stories about the mistakes people have

made, trusting AI to speak for them, like attorneys who submitted court

filings that cited fake legal cases.

That didn't work out for them.

The best advice right now on AI assisted communication is to do it very carefully.

We're all talking about in the news and

everything about AI, is it good?

Is it going to take over for humans?

What does this mean for a virtual communication?

And my forecast, although I'm occasionally wrong, but we'll see with time, is that

for jobs and roles that require a human, making sure that your communication is

in your words as opposed to just copy and pasted from ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity,

whatever else, will always be valuable.

If someone's communicating with you, they want to communicate with you.

And there are ways they might tell that you're not communicating yourself

and you're just copying and pasting.

The other thing is these tools, these AI tools don't know every single

thing in your head, and unless we make it to the distant future where

there's brain chips that can read our mind, they're never going to.

And so there is a use for AI, it's great for editing, brainstorming,

for simple repeated interactions, sure, that's fine to use.

But for complex and important interactions, showing you care is

much more important than making sure that it's perfect in my view.

Aaron - Narration: Across all of Brodsky's advice is just recognizing

that there's a person on the other end, someone who has their own

preferences, interests, and experiences.

Even just the simple step of asking how they want to communicate can

prevent a lot of misunderstanding.

And one of the things that I often also recommend,

if possible, is early on in the relationship just asking the other

person how they prefer to communicate.

There's different ways that different people feel

they like more or less.

Some people prefer cameras on, some prefer cameras off.

Some people have reasons for communicating a certain way.

So for those whose English is not their first language, they might actually prefer

email or instant message, because it gives them time to proof and make sure

their language is what they want it to be.

The words match what they want.

Or maybe someone has hearing difficulties and they prefer text,

or they have difficulty seeing, so they prefer hearing audio.

So there's all these different things that can matter.

And one of the best things you can just do is ask the other person.

And being able to understand what they like, not only will help you become

more effective communicator, but they'll probably want to interact with you more

because you're giving them what they want.

Aaron - Narration: Even following all of this advice, we're

all going to make mistakes.

It's hard to see all that's going on, even just when sending

something as simple as a text.

It's easy to have terrible timing, for example, when we're not with a

person who's getting our message.

And so we ought to be willing to forgive more when others make mistakes too.

Aaron - Interview: How do we engage with more grace in the way people

are communicating, recognizing that nobody's going to be doing it perfectly?

One of the best things people can do is not only

realizing, hey, I make these mistakes.

I failed to engage in perspective taking.

But then the step that goes with that is realize, hey, everyone

else might not understand this.

We're all just getting used to this.

By many estimates, humans have been interacting for, you know,

over a hundred thousand years.

In the scale of human history, technology as an interaction

mode is only a very thin sliver.

We've had a lot of experience as a species getting to know how

to best communicate in person.

Email, instant message, video calls, we're all just figuring this out

in many ways as we're going along.

So just understanding that we're all novices in some regard on this can

be really useful for increasing your empathy and realizing that "Maybe

this message, they didn't mean that."

And the simple step that so many people miss that often leads to really

problematic conflicts, is just to ask a clarifying question, saying, "Hey, just to

confirm what did you mean here?" Because so many people think that someone wrote

something mean to them, for instance, and then they just stew on it and they

don't say anything back, and it turns out the person didn't mean that at all.

So just taking that extra step to just ask people what they mean can often

stop a whole lot of conflicts in their tracks because it's very possible they

don't mean what you think they meant.

Aaron - Interview: If you could change how people communicate virtually that would

make the world a better place, like it'd be a world that we'd enjoy living in more,

what are the things that you would change?

I would have to say that the first one would be for

people to take a moment out of their day just to consider how they're

approaching their communication.

It's so easy when we're overloaded by emails and meetings just to barely

get through the day, and we don't have time to engage in this kind of meta

thinking about is there ways that I could have worded things differently?

And when you actually take that moment to be mindful, if you do it the right

way and actually do it, you'll find you end up saving time because you find

more time efficient ways to communicate.

So just taking a moment, thinking, being mindful is one

of the best things you could do.

The second is perspective take.

It's the first thing in my framework because we get just so in our own

world when we're communicating, especially from behind a screen.

And if you begin to think about how someone else might interpret something,

you realize, "Oh, they would really like to get this congratulatory email. It won't

be awkward. Oh, maybe I should say it this way, so I don't accidentally offend

them." And so getting out from behind your screen and trying to think about

the person on the other side of their screen can be just incredibly useful.

And if we all show we care about each other a little bit more, I think the

world would be a much better place

Aaron - Narration: When General Washington read the letter that he

wasn't meant to see, to his credit, he didn't seek to punish Charles Lee

or Joseph Reed for insubordination.

Instead, he responded with grace.

He resealed the letter and made sure that it was passed on to Colonel Reed, but he

included a note in which he said this.

"The enclosed letter was put into my hands by an express rider.

Having no idea of it being a private letter, I opened it.

This, as it is, the truth must be my excuse for saying a letter

which neither inclination or intention would have prompted me to.

I thank you for the trouble and fatigue you have undergone in

your journey to Burlington, and sincerely wish that your labors may

be crowned with a desired success.

"My best respects to Mrs. Reed. I am dear sir, your most

obedient servant, G. Washington."

It wasn't until the following June, six months later that Reed and

Washington were on good terms again.

I am incredibly grateful to Professor Andrew Brodsky for taking the

time to do this interview with me, and I'm so glad that we could get

such great advice on pitfalls that we all encounter all the time.

How to Help is hosted and written by me, Aaron Miller, and producing

collaboration with BYU Radio.

My thanks to Erica Price, Kenny Mears, and Blake Morris for

their help with this episode.

Scoring and Mixing was done by Seth Miller, and our music is by Eric Robertson

and the Pleasant Pictures Music Club.

For more information about this episode, use the links in the show notes.

And if you haven't subscribed yet to How to Help, you can do that

in your favorite podcast player.

As always, thank you so much for listening.