Speaker, author, and the CEO of the Booher Research Institute, Dianna Booher, shares the lessons we can learn from politics about communication, mistakes we often make in non-verbal communication, what to do when trust is eroded, averaging rather than adding credibility, and tips to telling a story vs a narrative, and which is more powerful.

You are about to hear from one of the masters of communication. Her name is Dianna Booher, and she has a book called What More Can I Say. She is the master, and this very well could be her masterpiece. So Dianna, thank you for being on the show.

Great to be with you.

Why this book and why now?

Well, actually, I think it's probably because of politics. And what I literally mean that you see politicians arguing all the time to try to build their case to get people to listen to them. They're trying to build an argument, and nobody's listening, and it's people would just sit down on the same room and present their case. They could come to some consensus of opinion, but that doesn't happen. And if you think about it, whether we're in business or we're trying to sell something, or we're on stage speaking, or for an entrepreneur, and you're trying to present a product, and nothing happened until somebody listened and communicates. I mean, that's the core of relationships or whatever, and it's just like everybody's talking and nobody's listening, and we need to change people's mind if anything's going to happen, if you're going to build a relationship, you're going to sell something, to change people's mind and to change their action, you have to

persuade them. And if you don't talk and you don't listen, how can you change people's mind? How can you change their behavior? How can you get them to buy something from you. And that's just the Core Business Act is communicate. And it takes two things to do that, talking and listening in whatever form, if you're doing it on social media, if you're doing it from stage, if you're doing it one on one in a sales meeting. And so that's one book on persuasion. It's just there is a technique to it. It's not just all broadcasting one way.

Yeah, what do you think are some of the the top core reasons why communication really fails?

Well, I don't, actually, I don't know that there are any one more important than the other, but what I've laid out in the book is nine principles of why they fail, and then the count. You know, what do you have to do to make it succeed and to be persuasive? I think the foundational one I'll get, I will say that there is a foundational one, and that is distrust. If people don't trust you, you don't get the first date, and many people don't realize why people don't trust them, and what they're doing to discard that. But if you're going to succeed, to be persuasive, you have to build those with those trust relationships, and you do that with your word, of course, the way you lead, the way you manage, even your body language, your presence. Sometimes you just have this gut reaction to somebody when they walk into the room, at a at a pocket you need to immediately think, I did not like that person. I did not trust them. They're too bleak or whatever, and you

don't even know where that comes from. But if you can't get past that, then, then the other eight principles don't matter.

I want to talk about something that you just said about the nonverbals. Give me some examples, or some things that you see often in the nonverbals that really kind of, you know, affect our communication.

Well, we're familiar with the eye roll, the burning glasses, and you're talking to someone, feet turned away, you're looking at them, but your body language really says, I want to escape as fast as possible and not being approachable. When someone says something to you, your responses are as brief as possible, which again, communicate, I really don't engage in this conversation. Then you make declarative statements always, rather than asking questions between show interest. All of those things combined, there are things that you do to build trust that people don't realize either. Sometimes you trust people and you don't really know why. Immediately you trust them. When meeting somebody in the grocery store checkout line, you can be best friends by the time you get to the cashier. And if you ask people, why do they like you immediately you there are things you can do as well. You demonstrate confidence, and you work with someone for a while, and

they are always consistent. They always do what they say. They they repeatedly communicate whatever they're doing. It's not like they go behind the fence and make a decision and come out and announce it. They actually blame their reasoning to you, that is a sign that a way to build trust. They they they give you trust. If you're going to gain trust, you're going to gain trust all of those things. For part of building trust that people sometimes don't think about. And the second principle, you know, really has a lot to do with trust, even though we I divided it into another category altogether. It really has to do with trust as well, which is disrupting people's opinion. I cause it. Why? Communication? Sales? If you're always into a monologue, you're always putting out information, as opposed to collaboration. For example, if you're if you're a leader, you got a team, they've got people working with you. And you say, I've decided to do so and so, and you've made a

decision, maybe you thought of all the pros and cons of the situation, and you expect them to go along with it. They don't have your reasoning, and they're not so quick to embrace it. If you collaborate with them, you explain the situation and you explain it like it's all done. You know you've already made it. You're to the end of the decision, they're not going to buy into that nearly as well as if you toss it out as if it's not totally cooked, sort of, you know, got great ingredients out, but it's not a done recipe. It's not the gourmet meal yet. And you say, this is what I'm thinking. Here are the pros and the con. What's your idea about them? What you know, do you have some input? What kind of pushback are we going to get on this? And you let people add to and build on your idea, they're going to be much more committed. And in effect, you are trusting them to come alongside you and build on the idea at the form of trust. And it also helps you persuade,

because when people buy into it and they contribute and help build something, they can be much more committed to it. Or even people don't do that a lot of times is because they don't want to give away credit. You know, that much my idea was, and they coined the whole thing for themselves. That is, I interviewed people, so they've got CEOs. They frequently said that they preferred to have people collaborate, that they doesn't get regal out. It's time consuming. You know, people argue over whose idea was, if just easier to say this is where we're going or what people know they can always change things or give me their ideas or give me feedback, and then they're always excuses for not collaborating. But it's a huge thing when people don't accept or you're not persuasive if you don't allow collaboration.

So let's say I make some of these mistakes. Okay, what do I do next?

Well, it's it's very difficult to rebuild trust, that the key thing that you have to do is to let them see you in different situation with different people. And it takes a long time. It takes you years to build it, and you can lose it and say they can just see you in one inconsistent situation, so they just have to see you in many different situation over a long period of time to rebuild it. That's the bad news. You know what? One of the things that's reason I call these principles really pretty counterintuitive, and it's good to know them at the out that, I guess one of the things that would really intriguing to me when I did the research for this, and a lot of this, the way it's different from some of my previous books, is that I based this on a lot of research, going back to primary Research, that would be counterintuitive to what you would say, looking at how people react to you, one of the counter one of the natural things you would think, if

you don't have confidence as a leader, that you would stack the cards in your Facebook when you're talking to a client, for example, if you have reasons to do something, or You have credentials, when you're talking to a client, you would present all of those. You know, here's, here's one reason to do this, here's another reason for buying this product or going with our firm. And here's the third reason, fourth reason, etc. But the research shows that people average rather than add and here's, here's what I mean by that. See, again, let's say you're advertising. Oh, I don't know a new course that how? And you think here, here's one thing it'll do for you. And they said, that's great. I need that. That's 10, with your ranking benefits and how valuable they are to you. One to 10. Well, that's a 10. Oh, this is valuable. That's a 10. Oh, that's really valuable. That's that's a nine. Let's give that a nine. That's important to organization. And then you say, and here's another

benefit. And the client saying, well, that's not so important. Let's give that a five. I don't really care about that. So when they get through listening to your presentation, they say, Okay, that was a five. Five a nine to 10. Okay, up to that firm. Let's give that firm, that supplier, an eight, the average back, you would have done a lot better had you just mentioned the two benefits to them, the top two our if you take our training program, or have me come in here the speaker, or deal with us as a supplier, we can do this. Or you make a no, not the 10, that's very valuable. And we can do this for you. That's very valuable. That's a 10. So when I look back and write you, that's like, that the real that's a 10 supplier. Another way they average those two things. You mentioned, two key benefit. So you're a 10 company. You see what I'm saying about knowing the techniques up front. So hard persuade somebody and you know how to build their confidence in you, then you don't

make those mistakes. Starting out, that's counterintuitive than what most people would do. Most people would say, let me throw the whole chunk of information at you. Let me. Let me throw everything I can possibly tell you at you.

Last little thing I want to touch on here and make sure to work this in; you talk about storytelling in the book as as a skill, it needs to be a pervasive skill among professionals. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yes, the reason for that, again, is because we are the hag information available at our fingertips. Anybody that wants the information on anything from healthcare to Medicare to how to offend your baby, they can find it on the internet so they no longer need you just to get them information whatever line of business you're in, whatever industry, whatever role you play your job today, when you're trying to persuade somebody, is to interpret, to translate, to make it stick in somebody's brain, and to think it into their psyche. And to do that, you have to make it memorable. The way to make it memorable is to tell a story. And what I found when I coach executives, is that most of the time, they don't know what a story is. When I'm talking to CEO, they are narrating. In other words, they're taking an incident that happened within them or a conversation they heard, and they're narrating that where it isn't telling a story and they don't know the difference. I had a

major, top 10 company taught when I was coaching the CEO, I could tell the story. Let's work on storytelling. And he got up to do this in front of Zeo camera, and it won't story at all. And I said, Well, actually, I told him. I said, you know that that's actually a narration, not really story. And he said, really? I mean the difference, and of course, like flying, the difference. He said, Oh, am I the only he's totally embarrassed. Oh, beat red. And he said, Am I the only person that doesn't you know, I tried to alleviate the embarrassment and tell it, no, you're not. You're not the only person. But storytelling has just become a basic leadership skill, if you want to move people and change their thinking and change interaction, because information is just everywhere, our job is to make it go into the memory.

So, okay, so I can't let you leave, what is the difference between narrating and storytelling?

Well, story involves a character, and a character could be a city, but, you know, like the person that is struggling toward a goal, overcome the obstacle to achieve a goal, that's a story, and narration is just relating some incident. It may or may not involve a struggle. It may just be a conversation. It may be this is what happened yesterday at Walmart, or when I was on the airplane yesterday. This happened, but a story has some character. And again, a character could be an organization, but it's someone or something struggling over consistent obstacles to achieve an important goal. That is the basic definition of a story. If you don't have that, you don't have a story.

That is huge. Wow, Dianna, thank you so much for being with us. We wish you the best with your new book.

Great to be with you.