#252: The Science of Charisma & Awkwardness, with Vanessa Van Edwards

Welcome to the Lawyers Podcast, a series of conversations about law practice. Each week, we talk with legal entrepreneurs and innovators about building a successful law practice in today's challenging and constantly changing legal market. And now, here are your hosts. Hi, I'm Sam Blur. And I'm Stephanie Everett, and this is episode 252 of the Lawyers Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today, we're talking with Vanessa Van Edwards about charisma and awkwardness. That was very awkward. Nice work. By the way, if today's podcast resonates with you and you haven't read the small form roadmap yet, get the first chapter right now for free at lawyers.com/book. Today's podcast is brought to you by PWC Insights Officer Alert Communications, St. Box, and Ross Intelligence. We wouldn't be able to do this show without their supports of Stay tuned. We'll tell you more about them later on. Hey, Stephanie, what's this new accelerator thing you're working on? Yeah, it's super exciting. And so I'm glad to come on and tell everyone about it. We've designed a new shortened, you know, 10 week coaching program that's going to be super focused on helping lawyers attract and convert the right ideal clients for their practice. Very cool. So the way I've been describing it to people, and I'm going to tell you this, and hopefully you don't just cringe, but like lab is for firms that are in a position to work on their business, right? Like they both want to be doing this. They have some of the structural stuff in place to do it. They're scoring maybe a C on the scorecard. So they're kind of in the right place to be taking advantage of a program like that. Accelerator is for people who want to be in the right place, but aren't yet, or at least aren't ready to commit to lab yet, I think, right? Yeah, or maybe they just really need to jumpstart their marketing. I mean, the reason we called it accelerator is it's like, let's get this thing moving and moving in the right direction and gets the money coming in. And it's going to be the first of the year. So it felt like the right time to really help people focus on this. And we're going to be super targeted and structured in the way we deliver the program. So each week, you're going to learn a new concept, get homework, implement that homework, get feedback on that homework. You're going to have opportunities for some group coaching calls. We're going to do role playing. We're going to practice. We're going to do all the things. It's going to be for an online experience. It's also going to be really interactive with our team. And I'm really excited about it. So it's $1,500, right? And it's a 90 day program. Yeah, 10 weeks. Very cool. Very close. I think there's a couple of like catch up weeks built into that too, right? It's work. I mean, you'll have the opportunity to complete it in more than 10 weeks if you need it to. I see. But it's designed to give you something to do actionable each and every week. I've been telling people, you know, if you're ready to commit about two or three hours a week of working on your business, working specifically on creating a strategic marketing plan and implementing it, then, you know, come check it out and do this with me. I feel comfortable saying that if you commit to this program, it will more than pay for itself. Oh, yeah. That's the idea. Absolutely. In fact, my hope is that it would actually pay for it's plus a year of lab plus plus, right? So that it would be a no brainer if you did this. And then you want it to join us for lab. You'd be all ready to go for the year. And as this gets pushed out, it's going to be Thanksgiving. So we decided to experiment. We're going to do a cyber Monday special. Very cool. When does that kick off? Yeah. So anyone who registers for this by cyber Monday, which is December 2nd, is going to have an opportunity to do a special group coaching call with me in December on strategic planning for 2020. So a little bit extra. Yeah. Where do people go to sign up for it? They can head over to lawyers.com/accelerator. Fantastic. So do that. Check that out. Answered conversation with TC Whitaker from PWC Insights Officer. And then my conversation with Vanessa. Hi, everyone. TC Whitaker CEO of PWC Insight Officer looking forward to speaking with you. Hey, TC. Welcome back. So last time we talked about efficiency and process and technology. And this time you were saying that if your books aren't right and you're not billing on time, maybe you're not lazy. Maybe you've got bad data. What do you mean by that? So what oftentimes happens is we start to see the symptoms of the underlying, what's really going on underneath. There will be certain symptoms that will start to pop up. And those symptoms oftentimes are, I can't get my financial statements. I don't know where these things are. Or, you know, I just can't get my bills out on time. We're trying and we're trying to do the right things and make all this happen. But these are simply just symptoms of oftentimes a much bigger problem that's going on underneath. It's oftentimes not seen. It's like the blinking zeros on the VCR, right? For our older listeners. You got it. It's hard so you don't do it. That's exactly right. And so underneath all of this, what happens oftentimes is that we get bad data in the wrong places. None of our systems talk to each other. We can't move this data seamlessly across the entirety of our business or the entirety of our firm. The result of this is that certain things don't work right in our firm. All of a sudden, one thing breaks down over here and we can't get our financial records. And another thing breaks down over here and we can't get bills in that long time. And what's really going on is something much more deeper underneath the surface of, do we even have the right systems and processes and things in place so that this data that pushes and drives all of this stuff inside of our firm can enable us to do these things like and now bills on time or produce our financial records at the end of a period at the end of a month or a quarter. So you're talking about the importance of the infrastructure really, but also you have to know what your data is, right? And that leads us to talk about key performance indicators or KPIs, but not just any, right? It's more about the right ones at the right time. That's exactly right, Sam. And I am probably one of the most bizarre CPAs on the planet. And I am. I see more about that. I am on a mission. Okay. I am traveling the country. I am on a mission for these small business owners to kill their financial statements. Okay. Everyone thinks I need to look at my PNL and I need to look at my balance sheet and please do not look at a cash flow statement. No one outside of CPAs understand how to read these things anyway. These things are completely useless to business owners. If you want only rear view mirror facing metrics, look at your financial statements because all that's going to tell you is what's happened behind you. And what I think is when you're running a small law firm, what you need to be doing is looking at the KPIs and metrics which are going to tell you what's over the hill, what's coming around the next corner so that we can start to make really good business decisions about what we should do next versus just looking completely in the past. Here's what I did last quarter. Here's what I did last year. These things are just not helpful for the real management of the firm. KPIs are canaries, right? What you're trying to do is not tell the story of what went wrong but you're trying to forecast what is going to go wrong based on how these numbers are trending and give you enough time to fix it. And with correctly set KPIs and not a whole bunch of them, but a few that are very pointed on the right things. When you look at those and say, abreast of those and measure those, they can actually help you on the predictive side. We're talking about this obviously because insights officer, your product can help lawyers with automated billing and bookkeeping and insights like KPIs and gathering those things and presenting them. So listeners, if you'd like to learn more about how insights officer can help your firm with automated bookkeeping, billing insights and KPI tracking, visit insights officer.com to learn more. Thanks so much, TC. See you again. Thanks, Dan. I'm so happy to be here. My name is Vanessa Van Edwards and I'm an author of the bestselling book, Captivate, the Science of Succeeding with People. And I run science of people, a human behavior research lab. Welcome Vanessa. Thanks so much for coming. So I'm familiar with you primarily by watching your TED talks where you talk about what almost feels like sort of body language hacking or brain hacking through interaction. Is that, is that an okay way to describe it? Yeah. I love the word hacking. Body language hacking, communication hacking. I've always liked shortcuts, right? Yeah. Thinking about, okay, what's the fastest way that I can be more charismatic or be more successful? And it doesn't mean it doesn't acquire hard work. It just means it's the most efficient way. Are you primarily an educator, a speaker, a teacher or is there a consulting aspect to what you do too? And mostly it's educating, teaching, writing, researching. I don't really do any consulting, although I do corporate speaking. But that's also pretty much like teaching from stage. Sure. So when you say charisma, it's funny. You know, we talk in the business world more lately about emotional intelligence and empathy and things like that. And the word charisma doesn't come up a whole lot. It feels like so. Explain what that is and why it's something that you focus on. Yeah. And it's really interesting personality trait. It's sort of like the mysterious girl of personality traits. And the reason for that, we were actually doing a research study in our lab. And it was about something totally different. It was about personality. But we had two questions in our study that brought up a new puzzle. And the first question was, who is the most charismatic person you know? And immediately people were able to answer. They could just think of it, oh, my dad, my boss, my sister, my teacher. They just could answer that question right away. The second question is where it got more interesting. So right after that, we asked, what is charisma? And this question, it was so funny. People immediately got less confident. And they would say things like, well, you know, it's that feeling. And they would inevitably bring up that charismatic person again. Right. And I realized that person. Yeah, it's that person. And I realized charisma is one of the only traits that we know the moment we see it, but we have a very hard time defining it. Yeah. And I thought that's a puzzle. So when you actually look at the charisma of research, and so when you look at there's some really interesting research done by Harper Business School, and they found that there are two traits that we use to immediately judge people. And the two traits we use are warmth and competent. And this is surprising because if you were to ask most people, when you make a first impression, what traits do you think you you show first? Most people will say things like trust, they'll say things like confidence, they'll say things like power. And those are all secondary, but actually the very first thing we're looking at is warmth, which is can am I safe with you? And so that's a very, very different kind of friend or felt very, very quickly first. The second thing we're looking at is competence. Can I believe you? Are you capable? Gotcha. And so that framing is actually the definition, my definition of charisma that charisma is the perfect blend of warmth and competence. That very, very highly charismatic people. As extremely approachable, trustworthy, friendly, warm at the same time as very capable, powerful, confident, competent. Like this person can handle themselves, but they're not going to hurt me. Exactly. And by the way, this is really important because you know, I work with a lot of attorneys and a lot of the time they have just one of these. So they'll focus a lot on their competence. So if you think about charisma like a scale and I, whenever anyone comes into my lab or in my courses, I make them place themselves in the charisma scale. If you think of charisma right in the middle, one thought is on the left, competence is on the right. Most of my attorneys or very professional clients will put themselves very high into competence. And that's good, but the problem is if you're just competent without the warmth, people see you as cold, intimidating, hard to talk to. You have team members that won't open up to you. You might have people who keep something from you or don't give you all the information. You might have trouble connecting with people personally. And so it's really important that we balance out our competence with warmth. And on the other side, if you're very high on the warm side, for example, I work with many people in HR or marketing who might fall a little higher on the warmer side. And they have the opposite problem. They have the problem of they're constantly interrupted. People forget having met them before. People never remember their name. When they have an idea, people don't really take them seriously. Now people are, they verbal vomit all over them. They tell them all their problems. You're my best friend. They want a bond. But they can't be taken seriously. And so my goal is finding that balance. That sweet spot of always making sure you're hitting both of them. Because I think that's what highly charismatic is. So you're talking about these things as if they can be taught. And so I'm guessing that you think that's true. That we can learn, you know, if we lack warmth, we can learn how to be a warmer person. And if we lack competence, then I guess there's no hope for us. But is that, is that real? Can we actually learn it and make it not feel contrived or fake? Oh, yes, yes, yes. Absolutely. I would not be able to do what I do if we couldn't learn it. My entire job is basically teaching people how to be more authentically charismatic. That's my entire job. And what's really interesting about it is I like to joke that I'm a recovering awkward person. And I'm still very much in recovery. There are certain places and people that make me feel very awkward and very uncomfortable. And so I've had to manually learn the soft skills or the people skills to warm myself up to overcome my awkwardness. And the biggest struggle I had was all the people skills books and courses and frameworks I had ever seen. Like quintessential how to infringe influence people, right? Like anything, Dale Carnegie, they were always so amazing. But I had a really hard time putting them to practice. And I realized it for a long time, every social skills book or every charisma book was written by an extrovert. And the hard part about this is is naturally born extroverts who are naturally charismatic have a really hard time teaching non natural born extroverts and non natural charismatic people. Yeah, how do we care is not so they say things like be interested to be interesting. Now that's a great quote, but what does it mean? What does that actually mean in practice? Or they say things like just be yourself. Or they say things like just be more authentic. Yeah. If you're not an extrovert, if you're very awkward or very uncomfortable on your own skin, which was me for a long time, that advice confounded me. I did not understand it. And so my goal was to try to figure out ways that we could teach soft skills in a hard skill way. Was there a science behind soft skills? Could we figure out how to learn charisma, learn how to be with people without having to fake being an extrovert? 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A legal only call center alert communications has been helping law firms and legal marketing agencies with new client and take for over 50 years. Alert response to and captures all leads for your law firm efficiently using their highly trained intake specialist and software solutions. They work 24 7 365 as an extension of your law firm in both English and Spanish. Alert strives to set best practice standards within the mass tort legal community by using ethical ideals in turn elevating the quality of client services and earning the trust of attorneys. To find out how alert can increase your mass tort or class action lead conversion rates call 844 my intake or find them at alert communications dot com. Are there gender implications to this it feels like by saying you have to be warm and competent. It seems like that is relevant to the double standard that we often hold women leaders to where you know you're either a bitch or a push over and I'm wondering how what you've learned what you're studying has to say interacts with that problem. What's interesting is when you think about gender it's actually what's important there is thinking about your default so women tend to default to warmth for a lot of different reasons social constructs women have been taught often from a young age to get along be nice and be liked. And so they tend to dial up their warmth from a very young age it's also modeled to them. So fundamentally mothers are women not all women are mothers but all mothers are women and so because of that we just tend to think of women as more nurturing as more higher on the warm side. That's actually not a bad thing but it's really important for women to know just because of my gender I'm going to have more points in the warm column so if I want to be seen as competent I'm going to have to work a little harder. And then tend to default to competence because for a younger age they've often been taught get ahead be powerful win and so they might have also learned or been modeled to them more competence behaviors that comes a little bit more naturally to them that's not a bad thing it just means that when a man wants to come across as warmer he might have to do a few more things than a woman. So there might be some subjective biases in your audience that you might need to overcome if you're a woman you're going to get a presumption of warmth maybe and if you're a man maybe you're going to get a presumption of competence. Exactly so I know that when I walk into room simply because I'm a woman and I'm also a mother especially if it's a parent that I'm a mother like when I was pregnant my warmth I knew was off the charts if I walk on this a big stage with a pregnant belly which I did for a lot of my pregnancy. I knew that I was so high on the warm side I would really have to prove my competence and during that stage when I was on stages very very pregnant or doing any kind of workshops I started off with statistics and figures and accolades and social proof because I needed that to increase my competence at least in my first impression. So I think that what we have to realize is this is a dynamic scale and if you have a bad day for example one of the exercises I love to do with my students which maybe we can do now is where do you think you fall so can you think Sam where do you fall do you have any inclination are you warmer or more competent. I hope I'm relatively balanced but I'm probably skewed towards competence maybe yes I would totally agree you're very charismatic and I would agree at least. you a little high on the comp inside, which is good because of what you do. It's true. So here's my next question. I want you to a little harder. And I hope I'm not getting too personal. And this is what I want everyone listening to think about in your fear mode, or when you're triggered by a person who annoys you, or a difficult person, or you're in an environment that isn't your favorite, what do you do? Do you slide up into competence where you become know it all or begin to talk about your credentials or you try to be more impressive, impressive, press, and press, or do you dial into warmth where you get, and this is very common for females. For both genders, you become more submissive. You go into appeasement. You try to be more likable for women. Sometimes you giggle or you bobble head. Those are shenanigans. What happens in your fear mode? Do you have any inkling? I'm going to give you a weird answer because as many of our listeners have heard because I'm talking about it, I recently started taking anti-anxiety medicine medication. And before I started taking it, I would have told you that I would frequently get flooded with fear, and I would almost always go into competence mode. And since taking it and having a really great experience, getting really lucky with my first round of medication, it basically removed my anxiety, and now I have a tendency towards warmth. Oh, wow. That's lovely. That's really, really interesting. And that's also-- Also, a lot less likely to get that fear flooding, but yeah. Exactly. So your tolerance is a lot higher. So what I invite listeners to think about is not only where you fall naturally, but like who triggers you? What triggers you? And what do you do in that case? Like for example, I had a client that I was working with who would kind of get braggie. Like if he was uncomfortable, especially like holiday parties or places where he felt like, you know, he didn't know people in the room, he would brag and who would boast and kind of be a show off. And that is not his personality at all. It's not his personality at all, but it was extremely unlikable. And it was hurting his client relationships. And he now recognized that we kind of-- I was gently able to call his attention to it. Did you like role play and things or? I went to a party with him and watched him and saw that. That's what happens. And so I gently called that out for him. And he was like, oh, that's because I'm afraid. I'm afraid no one's going to remember me. I'm afraid no one's going to take me seriously. And I was like, look, if you brag and boast, I can guarantee you people will remember you. You're right. You are solving that problem. But it's not going to be for the right reasons. And he was like, absolutely. And so I was like, let's work on a, recognizing when that happens. So being like, oh, I'm being triggered. And then second, what is something you can do that is not bragging or boasting that makes you feel memorable? And what we settled on is telling really funny stories. So he's a great storyteller. He's a really funny guy. And I was like, you know what's way better to holiday party? Instead of bragging about your accomplishments, your accolades just make people laugh. Tell a funny story. You like it. They like it. It's easier way to kind of tickle that feeling. It's not saying just don't do it. And that's the hard part is when we're talking about behavior change, it's almost impossible to tell someone, don't think of the pink elephant because you think of the pink elephant. So if I say don't brag and boast, it doesn't serve you. And you don't replace it with anything. It's almost impossible to stop the behavior. So if you're thinking about a behavior that you do, don't say I'm not going to do that anymore. Say, I'm going to do this instead because that serves me more. Yeah, be proactive, not just negative about it. Very cool. Exactly. So we had Chris Voss on a while back and he, you know, as a former hostage negotiator and he had some like ninja tricks for negotiations. From watching your TED Talk, from reading more about you, I think you probably have some ninja tricks too. And I'm wondering if you'd share some of those with us. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So my first favorite ninja trick is to try to match and mirror the scale of someone else. And they've actually done a study and I believe it was with 3,871 liters. That is a massive sample size, by the way, if you ever see excellent memory as well, if you've got that right. I'm pretty sure it was that. That was an unbridled just top of the study yesterday for a workshop. They say all these liters and they found the most successful liters were flexible in their leadership style. And that was a surprise. You used to believe it like to be a leader, you have to, you know, find your style and stick with it and be really constant. But they actually found as the most successful liters are really competent, say in front of the boardroom pitching on their, you know, weekly call. But they're very warm in a 1 on 1 with their main lead or with the new hire. And so my secret hack for you is that she's not secret. My favorite hack for you is think about where you are on the scale. But then when you're with someone, think about where they are on the scale and see if you can dial up to match them. Gotcha. So you can dial with someone and they are smiling a lot. They're more bubbly. They're asking how's your family, how is your weekend, anything for the holidays. They're in the warm side of the scale. And that's when even if you have an agenda, you have a lot of stuff to talk about. You're client and you have a lot of stuff to get through. Your best served actually starting with a little bit of warmth and asking them back, warming them up, telling a personal story, smiling back, mirroring and matching before getting in the back, competent side. That way it's a really respectful way of meeting someone where they're at. Is there a corollary to that where if you notice that the person you're with is clearly feeling awkward, is there a way to reassure them? Is mirroring the answer to that or is there a way to, like maybe they're being awkward and it's coming off as really off-putting, is there a way to try and turn that around? So it's a funny question you ask and I'm just laughing because that is me usually. Like I'm usually the awkward person. And there's two choices you have if someone you can tell their nervous, you can tell their awkward, you can tell they're uncomfortable. And you do whichever feels right for you. The first choice is you share a vulnerability too. So you let them know you've also been so nervous or you're also having a hard day or you also get really anxious about certain things, right? That vulnerability to share can someone feel like, "I'm not the only one." If you don't actually feel that, then you can't share that, right? Because you want to be, make sure you're being genuine. The other option you have is, this is going to sound crazy, completely ignore their awkwardness. That can be the greatest gift to an awkward person and I'll give you a really specific example. So when I'm feeling really awkward, I will sometimes skip over my words, I talk really fast. So I have to like fix my flub or slow down and unseal it more properly. The greatest gift that someone can give me is to just roll with me. Right? Like, "Yep, I got you. I'm following you." But absolutely, that makes total sense. When I've just made a mistake and someone says, "After I've gotten through it," and someone just says to me, "Oh, God, on the same page, totally makes sense." I'm like, "Hahaha." And so ignoring it can actually be much better than highlighting it or making them feel worse about it. Very cool. That seems really helpful. Vanessa, I wish we had more time. I know you've got a super busy schedule and I don't want to cramp your day, but I really appreciate this introduction to your work. I can't wait to read "Captivate Myself." I haven't had a chance yet and I will definitely be sharing the link with our listeners. So. Yeah, yeah. I hope you love it. This, actually, everything we talked about this day isn't even in "Captivate." I didn't even get to my charisma science in the book, so it's all. It would be all in new contents. I hope you love it. Very cool. Well, I feel like I really want to read it. So thanks for giving us the introduction. Oh my gosh. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks for listening. Are you interested in implementing the ideas you've heard on today's podcast into your law firm? Could you use a little help? Hey, guys, it's Stephanie, the VP of Community Success here at Lawyers. And I'd love to help you tackle your business or take it to the next level. Head over to go.lawyers.com/start to sign up for a quick call with me. And let's talk about how Lawyers can help you create your best law firm. Make sure to catch next week's episode of the Lawyerist Podcast by subscribing to the show and your favorite podcast app. And please leave a rating to help other people find our show. You can find the notes for today's episode on Lawyerist.com/podcast. The Lawyers' Podcast is edited by Paul Fisher. The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not endorsed by Legal Talk Network. Nothing said in this podcast is legal advice for you. [Music]