Attending to Your Audience: Who, What, When, and How
I still remember a show I did off-Broadway that killed my soul. It was with my improv troop. We got up, put on an “amazing” performance, but the audience never clapped, laughed, or even moved. I’m sure they made an active choice not to clap or laugh. At one point, during an overdramatic western in the style of the old cowboy movies, another performer, pretending to be a tumbleweed, rolled across the stage. There was not a peep, much less a chuckle from the audience. It was as if all the joy was pulled from the room. The rest of the show was in the toilet, and so was the second show that same night because the audience had killed our drive. Instead of responding to their reactions, we kept pushing our brand of “funny” and let them throw more dirt on the holes we dug ourselves into, pushing us into the ground.
Does this performance remind you of a recent talk you gave? Or maybe a meeting you led? Or worse, a meet-up with a potential client, employer, coworker, or collaborator? It’s one of the worst feelings in the world when it seems like no one is connecting with anything you’re saying. Countless students mentioned having moments just like this during a conversation or presentation at work. Though these situations are not the same as the dictionary definition of “performing,” where you are seeking affirmation from people you don’t know (although, conferences are kind of like that sometimes), they might be even more nerve-racking because you’re talking to people you know and might want to see or work with again.
When I first started The Engaging Educator (EE), I swore up and down I would never, ever train people to perform in front of an audience. It was the big part of improv that didn’t apply to what we were trying to do. The affirmation from strangers? No thanks. It wasn’t something most of our students wanted either, and if they did, they were referred to one of the improv theaters in New York City. Some came back, never regretting their choice to try something else and realizing performing for a dedicated audience who was looking for a show was very different than professional and personal development. Some performed with the other improvisers and actors in their class and invited the facilitators from EE along.
Until one fall a small group of students really wanted to perform in front of an audience. They came to class one day as a united front and told me that they wanted to put on an improv show together and not with another theater. They wanted to do it together. My immediate reaction was first, “Why?” and second, “You do it every day, why now?” Every time we speak to another person, we’re talking to an audience.
Let’s take a moment here to define what an audience is. The traditional definition is a group of attentive people at a public event. If you think about this definition, there’s a very active-passive relationship between the performers and the audience. You’ve got people “onstage” actively doing something intentional and a group of people “off-stage” passively watching. The audience generally can’t do a lot to influence the people onstage, because those folks will keep doing what they are doing. The passive people, even if they are paying attention, are not necessarily part of the action. Even during interactive plays or improv performances where people are pulled onstage to be part of the action, people can still choose to sit and do nothing. They have no skin in the game.
But this is only the most traditional dictionary definition of the word audience. If you’ve ever been in front of a room full of people during a meeting, attended a networking event, had an interview, or even been involved in conversation, you know the people you’re talking to play anything but a passive role during these situations.
If we think of these situations as performances, then your audience is the person or group of people you’re communicating with and they play a very active role in your performance. If that’s one other person, that’s your audience. If it’s a crowd of 10 or 10,000 people you’re presenting or speaking to, that’s your audience. And you, the speaker, are akin to the performer whose goal is to get information across and be heard. You are not just talking for the sake of talking. If you think about it, we are always in front of an audience when we are speaking out loud. The only exceptions perhaps are those silent moments when we read an email out loud to make sure we aren’t crazy and we’ve sufficiently avoided the passive-aggressive tone we’ve been working on. More on that later.
Before any performance it’s important to ask yourself the following four questions: (1) Who are you talking to and Who are you? (2) Where are you? (3) What do you and your audience want? and (4) How do you feel?
Aside from being identifiers to tap into the moment at hand, these are also the major things that need to be considered in every improv moment. Without these four things, improv moments fall flat, stall out, and go in circles. The same things happen if you don’t have these identified in conversations, meetings, presentations, and interviews. Let’s take a minute to look at each of these further.
WHO ARE YOU TALKING TO?
An effective way to start thinking about an audience is to ask the very simple question: Who are you talking to? This might seem really basic, but hear me out. If you are talking to a group of people who understand your business, and you’re reaching out for collaboration or a partnership, you won’t need to get into every single detail about the business. On the flip side, if the audience has never heard of you or your company and you’re headed out to “sell” the business, you might want to and definitely need to start from the very beginning. That who is really important!
When you identify who the audience is, you must define what that term means. Get specific. They aren’t just “people.” They might be contemporaries you want to impress or coworkers you need to convince. You’d talk to a kindergartener and a high school student differently, right? Same idea.
When you’re doing the work to understand the audience, it’s important to think about them as more than just generic people. Ultimately, everyone in your life fits into a category within your life. This is something you’ll have to do and figure out for yourself, but here are a few to start with:
• People you want to impress. This might be an interviewer, interviewee, supervisor, client, coworker, or potential client. You want this someone to see you in the best light.
• People you want to maintain a relationship with. This might be a coworker, supervisor, or client. You want this someone to see you in a good to great light. You’re going to present a good version of you with the understanding that you might have some “off” days. We aren’t robots, which means it’s OK to not be OK. You do need to maintain a professional image, regardless of what’s happening personally.
• People you don’t care about. This might be someone who doesn’t have an impact on you professionally or personally, so their opinion truly doesn’t matter.
These are my three categories, and a good place to start when you create your own. The group of people I don’t care about is actually a really small group, because so much of my work is word of mouth. That’s not to say I communicate to everyone with my agenda in mind or categorize everyone I meet. That’s very different. I do want most people to see the best version of my professional self. After you take this inventory of the people in your professional life, start thinking about what version of who you are is presented to each of your categories.
. . . AND WHO ARE YOU?
Who are you? We’re not deep diving into your psyche here. It’s safe to say you are a different version of yourself when you talk to your friend at work than you are when you’re talking to the CEO. In improv, we tend to start with the who as interchangeable—you need to understand both who you’re talking to and who you are, and they both have to be clearly defined. People often come into improv thinking we’re going to jump immediately into doing scenes and being funny, but the fact is if we started with scenes, or as we call it, moments, I’m not sure people would come back! We tend to forget or not realize that too much creativity is just as crippling as not enough. If you have everything to choose from, you’ll get nowhere.
Since the who is one of the easiest to quickly identify, even when you’re starting out with improv-based thinking, we’ll flesh this out before moving on, keeping in mind that both sides of who might shift. An example of a who might be the version of you that is interviewing for a job you really want. I tell students this is usually that best-self I refer to so often. When you are interviewing for that job, you often wear your favorite professional outfit and are usually completely on point when communicating. Take one minute to list those best-self characteristics.
This version of you should be exactly that: a version of you. If you suddenly start using language that isn’t authentic to you, you will sound false. Same goes with acting in a certain way.
Here’s where improv comes in strong—you get to practice these whos. At one of our Level-Up classes in New York City, a vice president of a well-known communication company and an online talent with a food channel were paired together for an activity. They had one of the longest back-and-forth small-talk conversations either one had probably ever experienced. You know the kind of conversation I’m referring to: those painful ones where everything was about the weather. Their back-and-forth was awkward and superficial at best. It lasted three-plus minutes. I had no clue who they were to one another, because their relationship was undefined. The entire class was watching the moment with giant question marks plastered across their faces.
I called time at the end of the painful moment and asked the two students how they felt. My vice president, the amazing sport he always was, said, “I think we need some work on focus and objectives.” My online talent looked at me and said, “I have no idea what’s going on. That was the worst!” Instead of going into the usual what-happened reflection questions, I asked, “Who are you and how do you know each other?” Blank stares. The VP said, “We know each other,” while the online talent said, “We’re strangers” over him.
This confusion? This is why the foundational information is critical. Of course, in real life you don’t have as many options to choose from: you know who you are and who you’re talking to. How often have you clearly defined which who you’re tapping into before a professional moment? In improv, you get the opportunity to think about the conversation afterward with no regrets and all the reflection. It’s just a game, remember? We can have that blank stare “Who are you?” moment, because again, improv is a voyeuristic adventure and you generally have a facilitator calling you out. The audience (other students) is also there to help you with those things that you missed in reflection. In real life, you might walk away feeling like conversations stall out, and afterward, you beat yourself up with the woulda, coulda, shouldas. Instead of feeling the regret, try reflecting on how you can do it better when it goes poorly and plan for next time.
Using the solid decisions you make in improv and improv-based thinking as your guide, you can start defining which version of you will be at that conversation, based on who you are talking to and your relationship with that particular audience. That best version you bring into an interview? You’re probably meeting with someone who has some kind of say: maybe it’s the decision maker or perhaps the person who will be your direct report. Whoever it is, it’s most likely someone you’d want to impress. Boom—you’ve got your who on both ends.
Once you have a handle on that vague who—a hiring manager or a coworker—you can refine this further by adding details to your who. Is it a hiring manager or the hiring manager? Does the person you’re talking to report to anyone, or are they in charge? Or are they the person you have to interview with first to get to the person who does the hiring? See how all of this is deeper than the interviewer and the interviewee?
When you’re thinking about your personal who, start asking questions about them to decide your who. If you don’t know specifics, do what you can to discover them. We’re lucky enough to live in a time with social media at the immediate—you can quickly look up on the internet past events or people who work at a specific place. While it is a nasty rabbit hole, a bit of digging will help. Show the knowledge; don’t refer directly to your online research. This “show, don’t tell” concept is an improv principle we’ll see a lot of through professional communication. We’ll dig deeper into it when we work on confidence. For now, it’s best summed up as, use the information to inform what you’re saying, but don’t change your message.
Let’s take a moment to bring both of these whos together. At first, this exercise will feel incredibly contrived, and that’s OK. The following worksheet will help you work through a few groups and types of people, along with what version of you should come out when talking to them. In improv, we have stock characters. A stock character has clearly defined traits, and each person has a different set of stock characters because they are drawn from characteristics the performer can do well in a moment’s notice. This activity works out something similar, but it’s more about you than a made-up character you’re trying to be.
_________________________________________________
CATEGORY _____________________________________
TRAITS _____________________________________
EXAMPLES _____________________________________
WHO YOU ARE _____________________________________
_________________________________________________
CATEGORY _____________________________________
TRAITS _____________________________________
EXAMPLES _____________________________________
WHO YOU ARE _____________________________________
_________________________________________________
CATEGORY _____________________________________
TRAITS _____________________________________
EXAMPLES _____________________________________
WHO YOU ARE _____________________________________
_________________________________________________
CATEGORY _____________________________________
TRAITS _____________________________________
EXAMPLES _____________________________________
WHO YOU ARE _____________________________________
_________________________________________________
CATEGORY _____________________________________
TRAITS _____________________________________
EXAMPLES _____________________________________
WHO YOU ARE _____________________________________
WHERE ARE YOU?
The where in professional communication can be the physical location and the type of speaking you’re doing, whether that’s public speaking, a presentation, or a one-on-one conversation. The physical location is important in improv moments, mainly because it helps build the story and situation. In your professional life, the physical location is less of an issue, mainly because it’s already categorized as professional. The only exception is perhaps a networking event, which tends to border the line of professional and casual. Thinking about location comes with deciding what type of communication you’re about to be part of. Let’s think about what this means using an interview as an example. If it’s an interview with a panel of interviewers, it might be wise to prep yourself the same way you’d prep for any public-speaking event. If you’re in a later phase of an interview for a position that involves presentations, you might want to practice doing a sample talk or a pitch in front of a small group. If it’s a one-on-one conversation, it will be simply you and the interviewer. While the number of people involved is one of the easier milestones to determine in a conversation, it’s essential for the foundation to be solid.
Presentation, Public Speaking, Communication, Conversation . . . What?
While these are not finite definitions—nor are they Merriam Webster approved—they are how we’ll think about the terms going forward.
Presentations can be for a large or small audience. They are often planned, sometimes impromptu. Most of the time they are contrived—and that isn’t an insult to planning and preparing! The amount of time could be as short as 60 seconds and as long as a few weeks. Presentations are usually not conversations. They generally involve one or more people talking to an audience. While the audience might have questions to ask in a public setting, they also may not have the chance to ask them. Think of a presentation like a theater show. It should be rehearsed, planned, warmed up, edited, and in best-case scenarios, get outside “direction” (coaching).
Public speaking can involve any kind of communication out loud and in public. People are hopefully listening. It could be a conversation, a presentation, an interview, a workshop, a conversation involving small talk, or a networking event—generally any time you are talking, you can consider it public speaking. This doesn’t include those moments when you are talking out loud to yourself, to your dog, roommate, mom, or dad, partner, or friend, unless you’re doing this in front of a larger audience. You might be leading a meeting, or you might be networking at a social event, or anything in between. When you’re talking in a space with other people attending to you, it’s public speaking.
One-on-one communication or conversation encompasses communication that doesn’t have a passive audience. You might be around other people who are not paying attention to you and the person you’re talking to. A small-group conversation among three and four people also falls under this category. Note there is some overlap between this category and public speaking if you are having a conversation in a public space.
Communication is everything that’s been mentioned, plus some of the larger ideas around how we transfer information verbally to other people.
When we start thinking about presentation skills, we might think about things like the pose, projection, enunciation, cadence (how your voice moves through space), gestures, presence . . . all the “big show” skills we bring when we want to impress and when something matters to us. Public-speaking skills involve much of the same on a slightly lesser scale; if you are talking to two people and you don’t have the best and strongest pose, for example, it’s less egregious than if you’re standing in a less-confident way in front of a conference session. Digging into the definition of communication is when things get a bit more complicated. Communication means focusing on what we say and how we say it.
My belief hasn’t changed in years: you could have an appealing message about the secret behind living a life of happiness and how to make a lot of money, but if you do it poorly, you’re going to have quite a few people ignoring you. If you’re stammering, apologizing over your stammering, hunched over and presenting an anxious front, very few people will listen to what you have to say, even if it could change their life. On the flip side, if you talk about your favorite recipe for lemonade—even if it’s the kind you dump into a cup of water and stir until combined—but you do it with confidence, conviction, and care that stimulates action-orientated conversation, you’ll have people interested in what you have to say. Even if it’s simply lemonade.
Another even more infuriating problem: you plan, prep, and work hard, and you’ll still have to figure something out on the fly or pivot in the moment. Nothing will ever go 100 percent the way you planned, and the sooner you learn to roll with it, the easier you can be on yourself. This all? Easier said than done. Even if this is obvious, so many of us don’t do this. We don’t think about our style and how we present: we focus on content.
So why bother?
Here’s the beauty of these skills: you can improve them with a bit of work. Much like going to the gym, you can train yourself to be a better speaker and be confident in your style. Since polish can be so nuanced, it is in a separate section at the end of the book. For now, be sure to identify the kind of communication in your where. Is it a presentation in front of 100 people, public speaking with you and 10 people, or one-on-one communication with you and 3 people at a networking event?
The where also determines what version of you should come out. New start-up? Maybe not the time for the ultra-conservative suit. What you wear does tie into your who quite a bit, and they definitely go hand in hand. You add another element when you think about in-person, phone, or video calls. Regardless, the where is usually based on facts versus interpretation, unlike the other three.
WHAT DO YOU AND THEY WANT?
What you want could have an entire chapter—or book—on its own. In improv moments, when people are feeling a bit without direction, it’s usually because they don’t know exactly what they want. In professional moments, when people are feeling a bit without direction, it’s usually because they don’t know exactly what they want. In improv, this usually begins with two students. They get up in class to work through a moment. They have their who and where all figured out, then the conversation stops when they realize they are just going back and forth talking about physical objects around them. Discussing physical things usually leads me to think they have issues dealing with the here and now and I’ll dive into that later. But when the students themselves realize that the conversation is going nowhere fast, we usually dig into the wants after the conversation spins for a while.
The same concept applies to a professional setting. If you don’t have a focus or something you are working toward, you get trapped in the everyday status quo, spinning your wheels. For every type of communication it’s important to define your want for that specific who you are in the moment, as well as the wants of your audience. Begin by jotting down your goals first.
Ideally, your wants should align with your audience’s wants. If you want to sell your product, your audience likely has a problem that can be solved with your product. If you’re interviewing for a new job you want, your audience is someone who wants that job filled with the right candidate—you. If you want that promotion, odds are it’ll come with more responsibilities that will benefit your company. In theory, getting your wants and understanding your audience’s wants are as simple as noting what you want and coming up with one or two ways on how to get it, because they should align, but sometimes other factors are involved. Here comes the hard part: What if Plan A doesn’t work? Now how can you get what you want?
In improv, we think about tactics. Whenever I’m teaching wants, I have everyone think of a child who wants candy. That child will try everything: crying, begging, pleading, bargaining, tantruming—you name it. That’s why kids are so sneaky! They switch tactics quickly when a particular one isn’t working. That pivot and flexibility is a big part of improv, checking in and recognizing something isn’t working and trying something new (not easy for adults, no matter what kind of kid they were). While we shouldn’t pull out the waterworks to get that job or promotion, we can tap into different tactics.
When we think a bit more about getting what we want, we’re actually talking about influencing people. You can definitely threaten, demand, cry, beg—much like that child—but those tactics aren’t ideal for professional situations and don’t necessarily connect with both of you achieving your wants. To get things done and obtain what you want without full-on coercion, understanding influence is important and effective. According to the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), there are three main types of tactics that can be used to influence people.1 CCL divides them into The Head, The Heart, and The Hands. The Head taps into rational and intellectual ways: information based. The Heart relies on emotional influencing: values, purpose, and ideals. The Hands involve cooperative influencing: that big goal we’re all working toward.
Going back to the improv-based thinking model of determining wants and making it happen in your everyday life, when you’re thinking about what you want in public speaking, a presentation, or a one-on-one communication, you need to not only take into account how you’ll try to get what you want, but also what the audience needs to be convinced of. This sounds and often feels like a pretty large pile of tangled spaghetti. Let’s break it down:
You’ve got a meeting coming up with other people in your department or at your work. You have an initiative you’d like to accomplish, and you need their help—and simply telling people they have to do something is never a great tactic to get buy-in. You’ve determined you have to go in prepared and ready to convince a team of people who have been working a bit too hard this time of year. This is a public-speaking moment, with a little presentation thrown in. You can plan what you’re going to do and say, and there is space for the team to contribute and ask questions, which means plenty of impromptu moments. The who and where are clear, and when diving into the wants, you think ahead that this initiative will make a few jobs easier and allow for less stress around this time of year next year. Clearly, emotional tactics won’t work as well as intellectual or cooperative ones. Appealing with facts and information, as well as a collaborative argument, will probably sit best with the audience in the room and will most likely tie into their wants as well. That’s the plan: if convincing needs to happen, that convincing has to happen as far removed from the emotional as possible. By making sure you are effectively using facts and information that connect with what the audience might also want, you’re using influence tactics effectively.
Hard stop: this sounds like a lot of work. I completely understand if you’re reading this and getting a little crazy thinking and overthinking every single communication you may or may not have had, breaking each one down and assessing them. I’m not going to lie—this will be a lot of work in the beginning. It’s going to take some time to develop this habit. Initially, you’re going to be catching yourself after the situation, saying either, “Wow! I read that moment correctly,” or “Man, I made giant mess of that.” The reflective aspect of learning is incredibly helpful. It’s another aspect of improv that can move right into reality with a small pivot. Ask yourself how something went, and really think: Did I know what version of me I had to bring into the situation? Do I know my where? Did I try tactics to get what I want, and did I even know what I wanted? If you’re hesitating on one of these answers, the communication probably didn’t go well.
Since wants are so nuanced, consider this as more of an introduction into wants. The core questions of what do you want and what do they want should be addressed in each individual moment. Getting what you want is never going to be 100 percent effective—no one gets everything. The more you learn about people in professional communication, the more you can both adjust expectations and ideas moving forward.
HOW DO YOU FEEL?
There’s one last element that can make or break the foundation of communication—how you feel. Here’s where things get a little messy—messier, if you will. This is less about how much information you give out regarding how you feel in a situation and more about how you feel about a situation. Let’s address how you feel in a situation first, because you’re human. We all are. I’ve always been a firm believer that it’s OK to not be OK: we all have bad days, rough days, days we wish we could just do over. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said, “My, what a year this week has been”—and that’s OK. We can’t be bright and sunny all the time. Pretending is exhausting, and we are all going to have bad days that we just can’t hide behind the screen.
On the flip side, being more than an open book at work leads to some pretty uncomfortable and awkward situations. Many people talk about specific ways to be and act at work, and many people come into improv hoping to work on professionalism or being taken seriously at work. There are a few polishing tips and warm-ups I’ll get into in a later section, but this goes back to what version of you you’re bringing into that moment. Quite a few women come into public classes and private workshops wanting to present themselves in a way that earns them respect and helps them be seen in a professional manner. My answer is always the same: be the best version of you. Whatever that version is, that’s who should show up when you need to be taken seriously. When it comes to showing emotions at work in communication, keep the best version of you in mind at all times.
At the same time, it’s important to be honest with whatever specific feeling you have. You have to be honest with yourself above all things. When you enter a situation and you’re having an awful day, be mindful of your emotions and how they may impact your reactions. That lens is crucial to how you’re taking in information. If you have any control on when you can give a presentation or host a meeting, you might want to do whatever you can to make sure it’s on a day you know you’re going to be feeling pretty great. Scheduling it after a long flight, a big move, or another big change in your personal life might be a poor choice. The awareness of your emotions prior to entering a speaking situation will only be more information in your control. Since we can’t control everything, controlling whatever you can gives you structure for greater flexibility. If you can’t adjust the day and you know you’re having a bad one, take a moment to focus on what you can control in and for that moment. Can you acknowledge you’re not feeling the best and do what you can to help it work out in the best way possible?
The how also pertains to your perception of the situation. Do you care? Hopefully yes! We both know it’s not always yes.
The idea of caring about what you’re talking about is huge. If you don’t care, why should the people you’re talking to care or listen to you? This is where the how gets a little difficult. If you don’t care about what you’re talking about, everyone in the room can see it. They might not know why they feel a little funny about what you’re saying or why things feel a little off. We re-create the energy we put out. If that energy is happy and excited, people are also going to feel happy and excited. If that energy is apathetic or annoyed, that bounces into your audience and right back at you, which leaves you more apathetic or annoyed, which sends that energy right back at the audience, and that is going to bounce right back . . . see the vicious cycle? It’s one that leaves a lot of people annoyed with their public-speaking skills. If the only energy you get back is apathy, annoyance, fear, nervousness—or whatever negative emotion you are projecting out at your audience—your feelings won’t be positive toward speaking in public. Make sense?
When you’re thinking about how you feel about a public-speaking situation, presentation, or one-on-one communication, the best thing to do is immediately swing positive. This isn’t about faking it or being false—authenticity is one of the most important things when you are communicating. It’s about taking reality and looking at the positive side, not the doom and gloom.
For example, say you aren’t thrilled about a new initiative at work. You’ve been asked to give a presentation about it during a meeting. You can present it as a negative, or worse, do it in a way that seems false. Or . . . you can present it as a change, highlighting the positive and negative, giving it thoughtful discourse, and leaving it open to discussion. You can bring up some of your concerns, or you can comment on those concerns from the perspective of someone who might find it positive and someone who might find it negative. Pivoting to the positive—or in this case, neutral—view of the situation lets you come across as educational instead of negative. You’re not going to go completely into optimism mode if that’s not you—there’s no need! You are just not going to go full-on negative with your thoughts and what the outcome can be. If you want to be catastrophic in real life, that’s up to you. It’s not effective to be there at work.
It’s a strange and touchy space discussing feelings and showing feelings in the workplace. At the end of the day, you want to keep your best self in mind. An extra part of this equation that complicates things even further: the way you show and express emotion at work doesn’t need to be the same way someone else shows and expresses information at work. It sounds obvious, but to so many of us, it isn’t. Often we want people to care as much as we do about a situation. If we don’t care, we want people not to care either.
At one of our classes, a director of public programs and an educator were in a moment together. The director was very set on a high-stakes situation between the two of them. He set up the situation and wasn’t getting a lot of help from the educator. His character was putting up a fence between his yard and the neighbor’s yard. The educator was the neighbor and didn’t see the issue with the fence. The director kept pushing for what he wanted, while the educator pushed to sit and relax. There was bargaining, pleading, bribing—everything the director could think of, and the educator just kept sitting and relaxing. The moment hit an impasse and I called time.
During the reflection they had two very different responses as well.
The director: “I couldn’t get her to care about anything I cared about. I knew she wanted to sit and relax, so I tried to make things as annoying as possible and nothing happened.”
The educator: “All I wanted to do was relax and I was sitting and relaxing. I thought his neurosis was part of his character.”
While this seems pretty funny from the reflection, the difference in their care was stark. This happens in real life all the time. Quick, think of the last time you cared about something, even remotely. Did everyone care at the same level as you did? There were probably people who cared much, much more than you did and people who cared much less. How frustrating was it on either end of the spectrum?
Emotional intelligence (EQ) is something that improv develops at a high level. EQ is the awareness, control, and expression of our emotions, and the ability to connect with others in an empathetic manner.2 The “how you feel” balanced with “how they feel” heightens. One of the best lessons we teach regarding emotional intelligence: you don’t have to feel the same as other people. You also shouldn’t force them to feel the same way you do, to show their emotions in the same manner that you do. You should try to understand how others feel.
Using improv-based thinking, there are a few ways to better understand how someone else is feeling. Reflection is a nice way to start. Asking yourself how you felt, and then the additional question of how you think the other person (people) felt. That why question that gets deeper into issues? That’s a good question to pose right now. Why do you think they felt the way you think they feel? Here’s an example:
Going back to a previous instance, you finish up that meeting about the new initiative, and you feel it went pretty well. It seems like most people want what you want: for it not to happen because it would take resources away from ongoing projects. There was one person who sat silently during the dissent, and that person has quite a bit of pull in the office. How do you think they felt?
You could go on the defense: they hated everything you were saying and thought you were an idiot. That’s probably not true, because they aren’t that petty kind of person. They might think the initiative is a great idea. That might be true because that’s a pretty logical explanation of their silence during the dissent. Why do you think they might think the initiative is a great idea? And why do you think they were silent when everyone else was talking? If they disliked the idea, why might they be silent?
While it might feel as though the whys will make you a little crazy, they are actually a pretty helpful technique when you’re working on your EQ. If you’re truly working on your EQ, you need to not only work on your awareness of others’ emotions, but also understand how you define and express yours.
There’s an improv activity called Viewpoints that feels silly when you’re going through it, but it forces you to get in touch with your emotions. Traditionally, the activity is conducted by a facilitator calling out emotions one after another, and the participants adjust their face and body positioning to show that emotion. I’m not suggesting that you call out, “Angry! Excited! Scared!” in your office, but I do think it’s a good idea to think about what your body does when you feel different emotions.
In psychology, there are quite a few different schools of thought when it comes to what emotions exist. Ask psychologist Robert Plutchik, and he’ll tell you that there are eight basic emotions.3 Book Two of Aristotle’s Rhetoric gives nine and Darwin will insist there are eight, and those eight are slightly different than Plutchik’s.4 Let’s experiment with a few. This is by no means an exhaustive list of emotions, but it’s a good place to start. With each of the following emotions, think about what happens with your face, your body, and your voice:
Go through each emotion, and think about how you show that emotion and then show it. Really dig in—how do you show things on your face? Is it more in your body? In your voice? Let’s look at happy first. What happens to your face when you feel happy? What happens to your body? How do you move when you’re happy? What happens to your voice? Or your responses to things going awry? You don’t have to get this deep into every emotion, but it’s a good idea to dive in more than, “I smile when I’m happy.” Look at one or two more, and think about how your face and body changes. For example, if I’m frustrated, my whole body is tense and I’m not the best to talk to. I don’t listen well when I’m frustrated. Take an inventory of how you interact with the world in the emotions mentioned earlier.
Viewpoints is the starting-off point for an improv activity that shows how much emotions truly affect our communication. Changing Emotions is the next step. A moment is played out with all of the other components—who, where, want—and starts in whatever emotional state makes sense in the conversation. Throughout the conversation, a facilitator calls out emotions and the people in the moment change their emotions based on what is called out. That emotion carries the moment forward, and the people involved let the emotion change the direction or heighten that moment.
For example, one moment in a workshop involved a man who was playing the husband. He came into the house and asked his wife what happened to the car because it was missing. She responded that she had finally sold the car because she was upset he hadn’t cleaned it in months. Simple enough—they were husband and wife, they were at home, specifically in the kitchen, she wanted him to clean the car prior to the moment and now wanted him to pull his weight, and he wanted to know where the car went. Clearly, the emotions were tense moving forward, and as soon as the conversation stalled a bit, I started calling out emotions like, “joy, rage, fear, love.” The moment could have very easily been tense the whole way through, but through Changing Emotions, the couple ended up realizing they no longer needed a car, because there were too many fumes in the air and they could change the world together through their loving relationship. Weird, huh?
When the reflection started, they commented on how much they enjoyed the change of emotions. “It made reactions so easy, holding on to emotion and letting the emotion do the work for me,” the wife said. The husband looked troubled.
I see this “processing face” all too often in workshops. We don’t always pay attention to how we communicate. It’s not really something we learned in school. We learned how to write, give a presentation, do research, and at some point during a job or college class, we learned how to professionally communicate. When it’s suddenly a focus, especially on emotions when you aren’t a person who often shows emotions, things might feel a bit strange.
Never one to let a learning moment go by, I immediately asked him why he had a processing face. His response? “I usually don’t show my emotions that much, am I supposed to?”
No, absolutely not, if that’s not who you are. This is not about using emotions to make decisions and drive communication forward faster. When you let your emotions lead, you make huge decisions, have a lot of initiative for everything, and react instead of respond. The purpose of Viewpoints and Changing Emotions is to show how much your emotions do drive what you do and say. They also help you better understand that if you are unaware of how much your emotions play into what you’re doing when you speak, present, or communicate, you need to check in to make sure your emotions aren’t leading everything you do.
Too often, we are so caught up in whatever emotion that is driving us, we don’t take a breath and sit and reflect. If you are reflecting hours or days afterward, think about why you made the decisions you made and how they might be different based on a different emotion. Simple example: A colleague asks you a question and you snap at them for asking the question. Was it a question you had already answered a dozen times so your irritation was (kinda) warranted, or did the irritation come because you were upset all day?
That’s a very basic example of checking in with your emotions and seeing how often you let those emotions drive your conversation. Sometimes, this is a good thing. If your emotions are excitement, happiness, joy, or motivation and you end up pushing harder, getting things done with efficiency, and overlooking communication issues you might have with other people on “off days,” great! What happens when you have those negative emotions? Do people get the best version of you in communication?
Understanding your own emotions ties into learning empathy for others. By developing an awareness of your own emotions and how they drive your communication and decision making, you’re seeing people in a different way. This awareness might cause you to pause before making a judgment of another individual and how they communicate, and it definitely will give you a completely different lens on how others might make their decisions with respect to communication. The idea of excelling at EQ is to not only understand your own emotions but also to be aware of other people’s emotions. By understanding how you show frustration, for example, you might see similar things in others when they are experiencing frustration, and that may change the tactics you use to communicate with that individual. Think about this:
If someone is frustrated, and you knew they were frustrated, how would that alter your communication with that person? How might you change how you work through what you want versus how it might be different when you are dealing with someone who is feeling joy or fear?