You have more influence than you think, with Vanessa Bohns

Leah Neaderthal0:02

Welcome to the smart gets paid podcast with me. Leah Neaderthal, I help women land higher paying clients in their B2B, consulting, coaching and service based businesses. But I've never been a salesperson. My background is in corporate marketing, and when I started my first consulting business, I learned pretty quickly that it's about 1000 times harder to sell your own stuff than it is to sell someone else's. So I taught myself how to do it, and I created the sales approach that I now share with my clients so they can feel more comfortable in the sales process. Get more of the right clients and get paid way more for every client contract. So whether your client contracts are $5,000 $100,000 or more. If you want to work with more of the clients you love, do more of the work you love, and get paid more than you ever thought you could, then you're in the right place. Let's do it together. Thanks for tuning in, and don't forget to rate this podcast. Review it and share it. Thanks.

Leah Neaderthal0:58

Hey there, Leah here, thanks for joining me in this episode, wherever you are, wherever you're tuning in. I hope you're having a great week, making some good progress on your business, and also, of course, taking some time for you. So I am so excited to share this episode with you today, this fireside chat, because today we're talking about power and influence, but not like big bold. You know, power and influence and convincing a lot of people about something big. We're talking about the power and influence that you already have, but you might not know it yet. The conversation I'm sharing today is part of the fireside chat series where I talk with authors and thought leaders about topics that aren't like about business, but that affect every woman business owner. I've done fireside chats on topics like going gray and food and body issues and the topic today, the influence we have and the space we think we can take up, this affects every woman's life, not only in our businesses, but in our everyday relationships and interactions. And I'm talking to Vanessa Bohns, professor at Cornell and author of the book, you have more influence than you think. So as you might have heard me mention, I am a personal development junkie. I am so curious about why I am the way I am, and how I can be better. And I'm always thinking about that for people, more broadly, humans, like, why are we the way we are, and how can we be better? And as I think about this for myself, of course, I think about it for my business too. I'm always learning new approaches and ways of thinking that I can bring to my business. So when a book came across my Internet recently called, you have more influence than you think, by Professor Vanessa bonds, I was intrigued, okay? And by intrigued, I mean that I went to bookshop.org immediately and bought the book, like, within seconds, like, I have a whole list of books I want to read, like a whole cue. But this one skipped to the top of the list, because even from the title, I was like, I have more influence than I think, really like, I need to know more about the influence that I have. And as someone who's not only helping my clients build their businesses, but I'm also building my own business, the idea that I had more influence than I thought was something that I definitely wanted to learn more about so I picked it up and started reading it. And I have to tell you, I could not put it down. It was unlike any other personal development or business book I've ever read, because I feel like most of what you might read in business books is like, here's how to do this thing you don't know how to do. Or, you know, here's this thing you don't already know right where. Here's this thing you want, and here's what you need to do to get it. But what I loved about Vanessa's approach to influence was that it's not about what you don't know or what you don't have. It's about the influence that you have already that you aren't even aware of. And what happened while I was reading it was that, and this happens all the time, because now, as a coach, I literally can't read a book without looking through kind of two lenses. What lessons can I glean for myself and what lessons can I glean for my clients? It's really distracting. Actually. It's like, sometimes I have to read whole sections over and whole chapters over, because, like, I'm trying to read it for myself, but I find myself kind of sliding into looking through it, through the lens of my clients, and what lessons I can glean to solve the challenges that my clients are facing. But anyway, so as I was reading this book, I learned a lot from myself, and I also instantly saw how it might benefit the woman I work with, and how it might benefit you too. These are the B to B consultants who, even though they're so good at what they do, what I see a lot is that they feel like they can't really take up more space than they already do, or they feel weird asking for things, or they feel like they can't really push back. And these are women who, in many cases, were total bad. Asses in their corporate careers, and pretty senior and did all of those things with the backing of a big company or a title, but on their own. It's really hard to do it in your own business, and not because of any fault of their own. You know, they're really smart, strong women just because of how we've been raised as girls and then as women. So Vanessa's book shows you that you actually can do those things. You actually have more influence than you think. It shows you why you have more influence and what to do with it using the tools you already have. It's very cool, and I'm so excited to share my conversation with Vanessa with you. Vanessa bonds is an associate professor at Cornell University, and in her research, she focuses on the extent to which people recognize the influence that they have over others in interpersonal interactions. She received her PhD in Social Psychology from Columbia University and her AB in psychology from Brown University. Okay, so between brown Cornell and Columbia, that's like three out of the seven Ivy League schools, if you're counting. Her research has been published in academic journals in psychology, social psychology, management and more, and she's been featured in places like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Economist and NPR. So I'm really happy to share my conversation with Professor Vanessa bonds, author of you have more influence than you think. Okay, so side note, one quick thing about this conversation is that I did it at home, and it was so loud that day, like everything that could have made noise, made noise during our conversation. So you'll hear my son laughing in the background. You're going to hear my dog barking. You will hear some traffic noise, because we live on this busy street, and I even remember that the doorbell rang twice in the course of our conversation. I think we were able to edit those out. But of course, my dog barked more that, so you might hear that. So the point is, there's going to be background noise in this one. All right, so with that, take a listen, and I'll come back at the end and share a lesson that you can apply to your business.

Leah Neaderthal7:12

Do you have an actual sales process? I'm talking about not a general sense of what you should be doing, but a real process where you know exactly what step comes next, who to follow up with, and when, and you can see at a glance where every potential client stands, if the answer is no, or if yours feels clunky or you're reinventing the wheel every single time I made something for you, it's called roadmap to clients. It's a free 20 minute video course, and in it you'll map out your customized sales process, step by step, from the very first contact with a potential client all the way to a signed proposal. It's the same foundational process we use with every Academy member, and it's completely free. Go to smart gets paid.com/roadmap. To get started. Professor Vanessa bonds, thank you so much for joining me today.

Vanessa Bohns8:03

Thank you so much for having me. It's great to

Leah Neaderthal8:04

be here. Yeah, we were just talking before this, and I saw your book as it came across my feed or LinkedIn, and the name of your book, you have more influence than you think. Just like hit all of my little type, a, overachiever, business owner bells, because I was like, you have more influence than you think. I was like, do I Oh, well, I need to, you know, I clearly need to learn more about this. And I read it, and I devoured it, and so I'm so excited that you're here to share with me and our listeners a little bit about your work. So tell us a little bit about where you focus, and how did you get into the type of work that you do,

Vanessa Bohns8:42

yeah, so I study social influence, as the, you know, title of my book suggests, and I study it in a different way than people typically study it. So typically, people are interested in how you can get more influential. You know, what kinds of tips or tricks can people use to impact people more? And I'm really more interested in what we think and how it compares to how influential we actually are, or what we think about the best way to influence people, and how that compares to reality. And my interest in sort of that side of influence our perceptions and how they align with reality started in my PhD program. In my first year, I was working with a professor, Frank Flynn, and I tell this story in the book. And we were working on this project where I had to go to Penn Station and ask people to fill out surveys. And I would go down to Penn Station from Columbia every day and walk in and go up to each person, one after the other, I'd be like, Hey, will you fill out my questionnaire? And it was such a painful, traumatic experience, like it was just really anxiety provoking and awkward.

Leah Neaderthal9:52

Even hearing you talk about it now gives me anxiety. So even

Vanessa Bohns9:57

going to Penn Station today, still, I. Get this just, you know, I'm right back there as this nervous graduate student asking people, and now that's over, like, almost 20 years ago now. And so we when the study was over, you know, I was talking to Frank about our findings, and they didn't pan out. The study didn't actually work. And I think I was kind of complaining about that, like, Oh my God, it was so awful. I did all this and the study didn't work, and he was kind of interested in that point, because he was looking at the data that I had shown him, and he was like, you know, you're describing this terrible experience where, you know, everyone's like, rejecting you, and it's so awkward, and, you know, it's so anxiety provoking, but I'm looking at this, and actually most people are saying yes to you when you're asking them. And he was like, You know what actually happened when you talk to people? I was like, well, actually, most people you know, were pretty nice, and a lot of them just said sure and wound up doing the survey. And so that kind of began this foray into thinking about how influence feels in your head and what's actually happening when you're talking to other people, and that's kind of what I've been studying ever since in that context. And, you know, looking at other people's research that shows similar patterns. I love

Leah Neaderthal11:11

this idea of, you know, not about how to get more influence, but what do we believe already about influence, and how does that jive with with with reality. You know the women I work with, a lot of women who are going to be listening to this, come to a their business, or come to a sales conversation, for example, with some preconceived notion, what they can do, what they can ask for, how the other person perceives them. And I think what's really eye opening about your work in the in the book is that oftentimes there are they're wrong, those perceptions are wrong, but maybe for not even the reasons that we think that they are. And so your work is around influence. And what are we really talking about when we talk about influence

Vanessa Bohns11:57

in this context? Yeah, this is actually one of the big things that I kind of like to point out about the book is that when we think about influence, when most people think about influence, and, you know, books or tools on influence, they're thinking of this really kind of narrow definition of influence. They're thinking of, you know, the person standing in front of the room making this big pitch. They're thinking of the times when you're sort of sitting across from someone with a totally different opinion from you, and you're trying to argue with them until they see your point right, or you change their mind in some way. And one of the things I talk about in the book, or a lot of the things I talk about in the book, are all sorts of other forms of influence. That influence is not just those sort of formal attempts at persuading someone to see something totally different. But in fact, we influence people all the time, you know, not just when we're standing in front of the room, but even when we're sitting there in the audience, and people are paying attention to how we're reacting to what they're saying. You know, then we're having influence on how they speak and what they think. The times we just give someone a simple compliment, the times we ask someone for help, these are all other examples of influence that can often be just as impactful as those times where we feel like we're just standing in front of the room, like really trying. And oftentimes those times we feel like we're not having a lot of impact, right? Because we're trying so hard to just totally switch someone's opinion or or make this big appeal, and we think we're going to have this kind of moment where it's like, they say yes or they totally change their mind. And that often doesn't happen, but there's so many more times when we make a little suggestion and the other person doesn't say anything, but they're still thinking about it, you know, weeks later. But we don't know that. We don't see that. And so, because so much of the influence that I talk about in the book is invisible, right? And we don't have access to it, we tend to underestimate it, because we think of influence in this very sort of narrow way,

Leah Neaderthal13:53

yeah, and I think that the way that we tend to believe influence is or should be feels uncomfortable to a lot of women, especially and the woman I work with, because, you know, the greatest fear that everyone that I work with has is they're going to be seen as pushy or aggressive or a salesy or what have you. And I love that this idea that to influence someone in some way, isn't something that you that has to be intentional, isn't something that has to be forceful. And I love this idea that, like, you can influence. You're not, like influencing at someone that, but you might be influencing with someone. And are there ways that you see that coming up, like, in maybe a business context, or, you know, in your work?

Vanessa Bohns14:42

Yeah, I definitely, I mean the point about, you know, many women feeling like they worry about influence. They don't want to push too hard, you know, they don't want to ask for too much. For example, a lot of that does come from this sort of idea of what influence is and also how someone. Is likely to respond to influence. So one thing I talk about a lot is this sort of presumption that we are fighting against someone when we're trying to influence them. And so I like the phrase that you use about influence with someone, because that's more of a presumption of, like, this is an interpersonal interaction. This is actually a social thing, right? This can be a friendly endeavor, where we're just, you know, talking in ways that we kind of change each other's minds, and we're just thinking about what the other person has to say, right? But we we think, when we think influence, we think of it as a smart, aggressive, assertive kind of thing. And actually, the research shows that we tend to think that that is the best way to persuade people is to be more assertive, right? And then a lot of people who don't want to be assertive, for example, women who are sort of prescriptively told to, you know, be friendly and communal and not rock the boat and not be too assertive, right? Don't want to push like that. And so we kind of do the opposite. We hold back entirely. We don't ask for certain things, because we don't want to come across as too aggressive or assertive or not warm enough, right? We negotiate ourselves down before we actually ask for something, because we don't want to ask for too much. And so we kind of do one of those two things. We push too hard, or, if we don't want to push really hard, because we think that's how to have influence, we hold back. And that does tend to, I think, impact women a little bit more than men?

Leah Neaderthal16:23

Yeah. I mean, what's that about? I mean, I think you and I probably can, can sort of make a few assumptions here, but, I mean, I guess my first question is, does this impact women more than men? You know, this perception that they either don't have influence or or can't ask for what they want or whatever. And what have you uncovered that explains that?

Vanessa Bohns16:43

Yeah, you know, one of the interesting things that I found is we expected to find gender differences in the actual bias going in like that women would, you know, either be more or less accurate about whether someone would agree to things that they would do, or would, you know, have a different sort of level of underestimating or overestimating how much other people were paying attention to them. But actually, in much of the research that I reviewed, we don't find gender differences in those actual sort of perceptions. But where it matters is what it means to men and women and whether it means something different. So for example, one of the studies I talk about in the book is something called the liking gap. And the liking gap is basically the tendency to interact with someone, walk away from that interaction and think that they liked you less than they actually did. Because we focus on all the things we wish we had done better, the things we, you know, said that we wish we hadn't, the things we, you know, wish we had said that we didn't, etc.

Leah Neaderthal17:43

That's so much like a lot of women coming out of either any sort of business conversation or client conversation or networking interaction. You know, you just like beat yourself up on the way out the door, but what's going on in reality?

Vanessa Bohns17:57

Yeah, we're in reality, we're just way more harsh on ourselves than other people are on us, and no one else is sort of paying attention to those same things that we're paying attention to, all the things we feel like we did wrong. And in that research, in terms of the gender differences, both men and women do this right, but I think it means that much more to women, and it therefore affects them and their behavior so much more because of this idea that women are supposed to be likable, women are supposed to be warm. And if you don't, you know, show up in those ways that there's this kind of backlash. And so even though everyone kind of makes the mistake that, oh, you know, I think this, this conversation didn't go as well as the other person actually thinks it went, it's that much more impactful for women, and I think that can hold them back and make them worry more about, you know, engaging and just going out and talking to people, and also kind of obsess more after they leave and worry about whether, you know that person really liked them.

Leah Neaderthal18:56

Yeah, they're obsessing and they're ruminating, and they're, you know, picking apart everything. But I think what's really interesting is that we only know the sort of ruminating that goes on in our heads, our own heads. We don't know the ruminating that goes on in anybody else's heads. And so you know that same thing can be happening, but we think that, you know, they must walk away from this interaction. They haven't thought about it since, or they don't really aside from thinking that we were a moron, right? They're not beating themselves up, only we are right. So we're the ones who are somehow lacking right, or like, can't get it together, or whatever. So and I, you know, hear this a lot from the women I work with, so really, what we're talking about is the ways we underestimate our our influence. And I don't know if you can hear this noise in the background, my son laughing, yeah. What are some other ways that we don't realize or even tend to underestimate the influence that we have? And I want to keep sort of coming back to this. I love this, like, idea of the underestimating, because, again, if it was. Me to this like this is not about how to be more influential and how to do this is about there are ways that we don't realize, and sometimes we are our own worst enemy in not realizing the power that we have. So what are some other ways that you've uncovered?

Vanessa Bohns20:18

Yeah, that's it. Just to sort of drive that home. That's exactly right. And that's actually why I wrote the book, is because I just saw how many books and tools were out there for people who wanted to gain influence, and it just seemed like people were constantly gravitating towards this message. And as a social psychologist who studies social influence, you know, I'm constantly seeing the huge impact that everybody has on each other all the time. And so I was kind of curious about what is it that drives people to feel like they need influence when I'm seeing them impact people constantly? And so this is really sort of identifying these biases, these psychological biases we have that lead us to miss the times that we're impacting another person. And so some of those times are when we're just present in a room. So some research on something called the invisibility cloak illusion shows that we basically feel like no one's sort of noticing us in a particular scenario or scene, when, in fact, many more people are noticing us than we tend to think. And it's not even the things that we're worried they're noticing, you know, it's not like our, you know, bad hair day or some stain or the time we tripped, it's just our sort of general presence, like, you know, you're there, and I'm considering your behavior, and maybe I'm kind of adapting my behavior to be aligned with yours. And so that's, that's one of the things we tend to overlook. Some others are that we underestimate how likely people are to agree to things that we ask them to do. So that's a pretty big one that I found in my own research. Now with having participants ask over 15,000 people for things and asking them basically, how likely do you think it is that someone would agree to this request, then they go out and do it, and they find, time and time again, that people are actually twice as likely to do things for them as they tend to think so. It's very sort of a recreation of that Penn Station study, right? But just putting other people in that position that I hated being in myself, we also underestimate how much other people are persuaded by the things that we have to say. So we, you know, we think we have to phrase things perfectly. We worry that, you know, people don't like us that much, or, you know, we at least underestimate how much other people like us. But really, people are listening to the things we have to say, the things we say, are reverberating in their heads long after even when we don't see it. But these are all things that we tend not to see because we tend to focus on the negative. Right? When we try to guess about the influence we have, we remember all the times we tried to influence someone and failed, or, like, those formal types of influence we were talking about, and because we're really bad at getting in other people's heads. So we're really bad at, like, perspective taking and recognizing that other people are thinking about the things we say after the fact and in a more positive way than we think.

Leah Neaderthal23:09

Yeah, yeah, let's I think that even with these three we could there's like, a whole universe of discussion in each of these i So you talk about how we feel like no one's noticing us, but actually more people are noticing than we think. And I know that can sound on the surface, that can sound like, Oh no, you know, I should be even more worried about the things I'm already worried about, like my bad hair day. But no, I mean, it's we're not as invisible as we believe. So when you first step in having any influence, good or bad, on purpose or not, on purpose is to be noticed, right? And so more people are noticing than we think. There was something you wrote in a book about, what is it? It's like, you know, those situations where you are just out and about with strangers, and you, you and somebody else catch each other's eye, right? You like, make eye contact, and how awkward that feels. And then you sort of, of course, look quickly at, look, look away at something else, thinking, Oh, my God. They must think I'm such an idiot, like, I just can't they caught me looking at them. But in that same moment, you caught them looking at you. But we don't think about that. We only think about how embarrassed we are in that moment. It's, it's like, you know, this is idea that I once saw something that was like, think about a time that you were embarrassed, right? And we all can think about a time that somebody else is embarrassed. We have no idea, right? Because we only live in the echo chamber over our own heads, you know. But let's talk about, I think the two that really sort of changed the way I started to think about this were this idea of or the bias we have around how likely people are to agree or, and the flip side of that is how likely they are to say no, right? We totally overestimate how likely people are to say no. Can you speak to that a little bit and what? What can we take from.

Vanessa Bohns25:00

That? Yeah, this is a really interesting one, because when we're asking someone for something, you know, we're so worried about being rejected ourselves. We're so worried about hearing that no, that it's really hard for us to put ourselves in the other person's perspective and remember the times we've been on the other side and how hard it is to actually say No, right? So if you kind of imagine yourself in that situation where someone else is making a pitch or asking you for something, you know you try to find the words to let them down easy. You know you don't want to offend them or damage the relationship in any way. So there's actually this kind of social risk to saying no, that you could hurt the other person, hurt the relationship, maybe even hurt your own standing in the group. And so, in fact, people hate saying no, right? We default to saying yes when people are asked for things mindlessly and they don't have time to sort of process. You know, if no is so easy to say, you would think they would just say no. But in fact, when you're asked for something and you're not processing it, for example, they've done this with, like, cutting in line. If someone just comes up to you and says, Hey, you know, can I cut in line? If you're not sort of thinking about it, the default is just to be like, okay, yeah, right. So our default is not to rock the boat, not to, you know, do something potentially socially risky, but we forget all that when we're the ones asking, and we assume that clearly this person is going to say no to us, and we think it's a lot easier than it actually is for them to say no to us.

Leah Neaderthal26:34

Yeah, I think that. I'll just sort of layer on to that with all the things we bring to any sort of request or or anything like this in our own businesses, which is, not only are they going to say no, but they're going to hate us, they're going to if we're already a client, they're going to be mad and they're going to fire us. And if they're not yet a client, then they will clearly go look for somebody else. Because how, how could I have the audacity to ask for something, right? Yeah. And so I find that a lot of women are just, they're bracing themselves for that, and I think it changes the ask. Do you see that in your, in your findings?

Vanessa Bohns27:17

Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, there's a few things there that that it changes. One thing it changes is you ask for less because you're assuming that there's going to be a no. And this is the whole negotiating yourself down first, right? So we think, Oh, if I make it a smaller ask, they won't, you know, get so upset or offended or, you know, they'll be more likely to say yes to it. But we actually don't find that that makes a huge difference in a lot of cases, right? That we kind of focus on that and we wind up asking for too little, or we ask in more ineffective ways. So we kind of hint at things, and we're indirect, or we send an email, because that's more comfortable than actually, you know, showing up and having a conversation face to face. So we do all these things to sort of manage the situation assuming that there's a very likely, you know, chance of rejection. And I think if you kind of presume a yes instead, you know, you're not always going to get a yes, of course. But if, instead of sort of being on the defensive and, you know, creating a situation assuming that you're trying to get past No, but if you kind of presume a yes, it puts you in a position where you're asking for what you actually think you need or want or deserve, right. Because if I'm presuming a yes, then I'm going to think, Well, what do I want this to be? A Yes to right? What's really important to ask for? And you go into it with more confidence, you can ask directly, but not over assertively, because you're not trying to push back, but past No, right? And so you can kind of get the tone right. You can get the ask right. And so I often recommend trying to assume that you're going to get a yes, and even if you don't get that Yes, it'll help you with the ask.

Leah Neaderthal28:57

Absolutely. This is so this dovetails so nicely with the things that I teach my students around, how to lead a sales process, how to get paid more, how to get more of the higher paying clients and the right clients that you really want. And there are small ways that there's like so much that we could dive into here, but I love how you sort of tie that to you ask for actually what it is first of all, the content of the ask. But the delivery of the Ask changes also. You know, I think everything from the way the manner of asking, where you might hedge a little bit right? You might not literally, you literally, might not sound as confident. You might start to backtrack the ask in the moment. You know, I see this a lot with women who are like a potential client, asks for their pricing. How much does something you know? How does it much? Does it cost to work with them? They might say, well, it this is the price. But if that's not blah blah, blah, blah, blah, right, that's one small way that we start to negotiate against ourselves. There's this idea that we're always teaching people how. To think about us, right? And if you assume the positive and that it sort of extends into how you ask and what you ask for, then that teaches your clients how to think about you. You know? It just demonstrates that we actually have more control over that than we really think. And I

Vanessa Bohns30:18

would just add to that too, that I think if you get that No, which you know, again, not everyone says Yes, right? So nos are a possibility. If you get a No, I think a lot of people also tend to sort of melt down at a no and assume that is a no forever you know, for anything I'm going to ask going forward. And actually, what we find in our research is that when we have people ask someone for two things, right? You know these kind of long term relationships where you're not just asking for one thing, and then you never see that person again, but you ask for something, you get a yes or no, and then you have to go back to that person. Our participants who are doing the asking thought that clearly someone who said no once was always going to say no to them, right? You know, they're just someone who says no or they just don't like me. It's something about me. It's something about what I was asking for, something about the relationship. You know, they kind of globalized that response when, in fact, when they went back and asked someone a second time who had said no, they were more likely to say yes because they felt bad about saying no the first time, and that first no was really circumstantial. That's the other thing is, you know, saying no is hard, and so often when people do it, it's because of the circumstances, like in that moment, they don't have the resources or the time, or there's something going on. And it usually does not mean, like, no forever, but we tend to take it as meaning that absolutely

Leah Neaderthal31:41

so if you're listening to this, and there you've you've gone down the sales process with a potential client who ultimately said no, for some reason, that doesn't mean that they're a no forever, and the yes actually might be closer, closer than you think. Another thing that really blew my mind and has absolutely changed how I think about my own communication. Is this idea of the gist? Talk to me about what is the gist and and what it means.

Vanessa Bohns32:14

Yeah, so this is based on a theory by Valerie Raina, who's a professor here at Cornell, one of my colleagues, and she has this theory called fuzzy trace theory. And it basically says that when someone says something to you, or when you hear something or read it, you basically remember it in two ways. You remember the actual details of someone said, of what someone said, so the actual you know words, and you also sort of ENCODE in your brain, the gist, which is a fuzzy trace of what the person said. So I kind of understand, you know, they were making a point about this, but I don't know exactly what they said. And what's interesting is that that exact, sort of memory of the exact word someone said fades really quickly. So someone says something, it's like, okay, they said that. And a few minutes later, you're like, Oh yeah, they said something sort of like this. And yet, for us, when we're the speaker, we tend to obsess about exactly how we phrased something right? I stumbled over my words. I should have used this other word. I use this weird phrase, and we assume that other people are sort of picking apart exactly what we said in the same way that we are, when, in fact, other people are really remembering the gist. So they walk away from the situation being like, okay, you know, this person thinks this, and it impacts me in all these different ways. They don't think this person said this exact thing, right? Yeah.

Leah Neaderthal33:32

And I have to tell you, I when I read that, I had to read that part twice, because as somebody who I am, a word obsessor. Well, I love to write for one, and so I'm a definitely a word obsessor. And one reason why, and my my listeners will know that I don't do a lot of video because I think I'm going to sound like a moron and have nothing to say and so, and that sort of freaks me out. But when you run it through the filter of the gist, I started thinking about it like, wait a minute, what would I do if people only got the gist? Would I go live more? Would I write faster? And the thing is that I actually have it's actually helped me write everything faster, because I stopped obsessing. I stopped obsessing, you know. So what can we do with this? I mean, besides using myself as my own example here, I mean, if you knew that somebody only got the general vibe, what can that free you up to do?

Vanessa Bohns34:34

Yeah, I love that. I mean, it makes me so happy to hear that that's been helpful for you already. And if you you know, just to give sort of further evidence of this, right? If you try to explain to like your partner or a friend or something like a movie you saw last night, or, you know, an episode or a book or a talk that you saw, no matter what it is, if you describe something to somebody else, you are almost never going to use exact. Phrases, right? You're going to be talking at gist level. And so, you know, when you really think about how we all recall things and pass on that information, you can tell it's clearly true that we were passing along the gist, right? And so I think, you know, one sort of domain that I often think about using it in is a lot of people hold back from saying what's on their minds, but they're really thinking because they want to get the language perfect, right? And in some cases, that's great, like, we should be careful with our words. You know, words can have impact, and I think it's good when people are thoughtful. So I wouldn't say, just blurt out anything you say. You know, that's that's also sort of a takeaway of my book, is that words really do matter, but they matter on this more just level, right? So if there is something that you genuinely care about that you think is important to say, but you're holding back because you're trying to get the exact words right, right, or you're worried you're going to say it inarticulately, those are the cases where you don't want to hold yourself back and you want to actually come out and say it, because people are going to get the message without necessarily paying attention to, you know, how perfectly you

Leah Neaderthal36:02

stated it absolutely. And I just did an episode where the woman I was talking to, the client I was talking to, expressed this exact thing we you know, the episode was about LinkedIn stuff, but at the end, she was talking about how she tends to defer to the other people in the room, the people who she feels like have more seniority, more they have more to say. They have more expertise. They they should be the ones to say it. And this is somebody who has done her work for like, 25 years and has been very senior, and then when she started her own business, what we see a lot is that that that expertise, or the perception of your expertise, really evaporates. And you tend to sort of start from this place where, well, who am I? I'm starting over. They don't know me. You know, everybody else is more, has more of a right to speak. And it really leads to a lot of holding back first, but then, you know, worrying that you haven't said the exact thing, and then, of course, ruminating about it, like we talked about earlier. So when someone's in the moment right, thinking whatever they're thinking, or staring at a blank sheet of paper, wondering what to say, or looking at the 15th draft of what they were about to write, what voice should they hear in

Vanessa Bohns37:21

their ear? Yeah, this, you know, I love you, tying it to situations where someone actually does have expertise, but is surrounded by other people who also have expertise, and so you start doubting your own. And that's one of my favorite sort of findings about imposter syndrome, is that the higher you rise in your field, the more likely you are to experience imposter syndrome, because you're looking around at other people who are experts, and so now you're comparing yourself to people who are better, because now you're better, right? But in the cases you're describing, you know you might hold back and not say things because you see these other people's expertise. But I'd say a big thing to keep in mind that I really take away from this work on fuzzy trace, and the gist, you know, and what people remember is that sometimes we just want to know what everyone in the room thinks, right? There's this risk of what's called pluralistic ignorance, where if someone doesn't speak up, you assume they agree with the rest of the group, right? But if you feel like you have something to add, or, you know, you see that something could go in a different direction, or maybe you even just flat out disagree. We often overcomplicate influence. We think that, you know, if I'm going to make my case for why I disagree, or if I'm going to make my case for why I think we should do something different, I need to make a really strong, compelling case and come up with, like, the perfect way to say it, when, in fact, sometimes just knowing not everyone in the group is on board is enough to change the way the conversation is going, right? So if you're like, you know, I can't exactly put it into words yet, but I have a feeling that maybe this other direction might be something we want to think about, right, even without having the perfect argument, you've just kind of opened up that discussion in a way that could have a huge impact, if everyone thought that everyone was kind of on the same page, and they were just about to make a decision that kind of was along those lines, right? And I think we doubt ourselves and the ability of just something that simple, right? Just telling someone I'm not sure I agree with this, right? Or I'm thinking something a little different. I'm still working out exactly why, or you know what the details would be, but that itself can have a huge impact on a group decision, or the way other people in the room are thinking about things. Now, you know, the person next to you who wasn't talking may be more comfortable opening up and saying, Yeah, I also wasn't quite sure about this, and maybe they have an idea of why, and you kind of started chain reaction?

Leah Neaderthal39:41

Yeah, I think it's really that's a situation that a lot of listeners might face, because as people coming in from the outside, as consultants, they're being brought in to solve a problem, and oftentimes they see the problem very clearly and but the client might have a different understanding of the problem or what needs. To be done, or when it needs to be done. And so, you know, my clients are in a position where they have to be the voice of dissent, which is very, you know, like we said, it's very hard to do. We assume that will, people will have a reaction in some way. But doing the opposite doesn't feel good either, because we don't want to be we don't want to just go with the flow for a course of action that we know won't lead to the outcomes that they're looking for. And so, you know, what I hear you saying is, you don't have to have the whole argument laid out. You don't have to have the PowerPoint version of the argument. Sometimes just speaking up, in some way, is is enough. And I think also, I don't know if this is something that you've you've discovered or seen in your work, but in my work with students, we we talk a lot about hierarchy, because selling it exists in a hierarchy, right? And we, as as the people coming in from the outside, you often feel, even though they've hired you and paid you money, you feel like you're still in what they call this one down position. And what we also see is that people in a one down position tend to over argue and over explain. And so I think that you know, if you sort of take it, take all this backwards, it's like if you speak up, even if you don't have it all put together, right? If you don't have all the statistics and the talking points and you just offer it as a point of discussion, I think that that communicates more about your own confidence then if you showed up with a whole, you know, perfectly prepared argument, yeah.

Vanessa Bohns41:35

And there's even research that I talk about a little bit in the book where we think that making sort of a stronger argument when someone is in opposition to us is the way to go right, that that's the best way to convince someone, when, in fact, a softer, subtler approach, particularly in those situations, tends to be more effective. And so you know, this is more of a case where you know if you're actually dissenting, or you're seeing things pretty differently from the rest of the group, or from people who are in charge. This is more of like kind of one of these formal influence types of situations where you kind of want to change someone's mind, and in those cases, you want to get as close to their position and kind of bring them towards yours slowly as possible. Because if you come in, sort of guns blazing with the complete opposite perspective. That's where people dig in their heels and they show psychological reactance, where they just feel like, okay, this person doesn't get it right. So you want to kind of establish points of similarity, where, okay, I'm seeing things the way that you're seeing them to this point. But here's where you're kind of losing me, right, and kind of pulling them out. And again, a lot of times, you know, especially in cases with group think, where everyone kind of is on the same page. If you have a bunch of clients and they've kind of already, they think that they know what the problem is, and everyone kind of agrees on it, right? These are cases where just having a little bit of dissent, just knowing that, oh, wait, someone outside of this group doesn't see things exactly like us, can open up everybody's minds, because all of a sudden, now they're curious, why is it that you see things differently? Maybe I'm going to start to try to see what you're seeing, right? And maybe I want to admit it in that moment, this is where that invisible influence comes from, where you don't really know the effect that you're having, but maybe, you know, i Hey, that person who came in saw things a little differently. I'm working on that in my own head for a few days, and a few days later now I have a little bit different perspective on this, right? And kind of trusting that someone is still thinking about it after the fact, right, even if they don't concede right there in

Leah Neaderthal43:34

that moment. Yeah, absolutely. You really have more power. This is what we're really talking about here. You have more power than you think. In it, for the purposes of this conversation, it's power to influence, right? But I think a lot of what I I work with on my students, is you have more control than you think, and you have more power than you think. And here, you have more influence than you think,

Vanessa Bohns43:54

in a similar way to what we're talking about, about influence. People think of power in this really formal, narrow way, right? They think of power as authority of hierarchical power. But really, you know, power that you have power in your social connections and your networks. You have power in the information that you have access to that you can share with other people. You have power through just advising other people, and we tend not to realize that those are all points of power and influence as well, even when you don't have this sort of authority in a particular situation.

Leah Neaderthal44:26

Yeah, yeah. So where can people learn more about you? Where can they learn about your work? Tell us how people can find you, sure

Vanessa Bohns44:35

you can find me. My research, the book, everything on my website, which is Vanessa bonds.com and bonds is b, u, h, n, s, and I'm on Twitter and Instagram at prof bonds, and you can buy the book anywhere you can find it.

Leah Neaderthal44:49

That's great. Well, thank you so much for joining me and for chatting with me. And I can't wait to continue to read the things that you publish and see how we can help them in service of women. Are landing higher paying clients in their business.

Vanessa Bohns45:02

Thank you so much. This was a pleasure.

Leah Neaderthal45:05

Okay, so at this point we had wrapped up the official, you know, interview, part of our conversation, and we were just sort of chit chatting about how it went, you know, did we cover everything, etc, and we actually started talking about something that was kind of interesting, because this whole time we'd been talking about people's likelihood to say yes, but now we started talking about saying no, and I wanted to share that with you too. Let's listen in the parts that really spoke to me were the ones that we covered around assuming a no when it's more likely to be yes than the just, seriously, the just like, changed

Vanessa Bohns45:41

my life. That's That's so awesome I feel the same way, like I it really does affect how I go into situations and my confidence, just like speaking without I used to obsess. I used to write down exactly what I wanted to say before I would actually speak it. And, yeah,

Leah Neaderthal45:55

yeah, yeah. I think, really, your book was written for me because, first of all, because of the gist, and also because, I mean, if you think about how, how this conversation came about, I think is a perfect example of what you've uncovered in the book, which is, I read your book. Who am I? Right? I sent you an email. I invited you to come on this thing, and you said yes. And I was like, whoa. Like, it happens, right? Like, this is a perfect example. And so anyway, I really, I really hope that people get a lot from this conversation and they buy you.

Vanessa Bohns46:26

Brooke, I have told people that the risk of writing a book like this is that you basically can never do anything counter to what you wrote about. It's like when people ask you, you can't say no because you just told them, people don't say no.

Leah Neaderthal46:38

Well, that's really fun, but what if you, like, you have a legit reason, you know, like, what if you you can't make it, the dates don't align. I mean, that's where I think what's really interesting about this for women, and the woman I'm talking to, is this the social piece that you outlined, which is how there's a social risk of saying no, and so we're sort of programmed to say yes, but then you take it to women who are, I think, doubly programmed to be agreeable. And so what if someone wants to say no? What I see is a lot of like, over, explaining, apologizing, you know, and it's like, sometimes it's just like, I don't have I can't do it. It's not aligned with what I'm working on right now, or I just can't make

Vanessa Bohns47:23

it, yeah, and I think it's, it is that social risk. It's like trying to manage and mitigate it, right? It's trying to save face for the person asking, you know, show that I still value the relationship. It's doing all that stuff. But I think women do it, you know, to an excessive amount because of that social risk, because that's exactly the kind of context where, you know, we don't want to offend someone and risk this relational kind of issue, yeah, but

Leah Neaderthal47:49

I think you know, but back to this piece about when we think about this idea that we're always teaching people how to think about us, right? And in the context of, you know, this, this podcast, like we're always teaching our clients how to think about us. I think that over explaining when you do have to say no, teaches people it's hard to explain, but like I think it teaches them that you're maybe more junior or not as confident as they would if you just said, I can't make it. Can we do it another week? Yeah, right.

Vanessa Bohns48:19

Yeah. I totally agree. And the other thing that I worry about when people over explain, when they say no, is it signals, you know, that trying to maintain boundaries and saying no to things is counter normative to the point where, like, you have to make a big whole thing about it, as opposed to just, you know, sometimes it's okay to say no, for all of us to say no to set boundaries, and we don't need to be offended when someone says no to us. I think there's also the other side of it, you know, when you get a No, I think we can show that it's okay and make that normative by not getting offended by that no. You know

Leah Neaderthal48:55

exactly, exactly, I think, especially as women, learning to say no is a practice, you know, it's something we have to sort of learn in in adulthood, and it's a lifelong practice, because of all the ways that we've been taught that it's not okay, you know, you should, you should make time for other people. You should put other people's needs first, etc. So you know that, of course, it feels even harder to say it and like you have to over apologize when you do it,

Vanessa Bohns49:21

yeah, I try to tell people that every time they say yes to something, they are, by default, saying no to something else. And so if you can remember that, I think it makes it a little easier to say no, right, like you're already saying

Leah Neaderthal49:33

no, even if you don't realize it.

Vanessa Bohns49:34

Yeah, pretty much great. I love that.

Leah Neaderthal49:40

So it goes without saying that you should add you have more influence than you think, to your queue and purchase it wherever you buy books. My personal preference is bookshop.org. Which is an Amazon competitor that sources books from independent booksellers and gives back to independent booksellers. There's so much that the book covers and we could really only do. Touch on a fraction of it here, but I wanted to share a story that happened to me recently that illustrates one of the lessons that Vanessa covers. So several weeks ago, my wife, my son, and I were in the airport on the way back from visiting my parents. We were at the gate waiting to board, and when they made the announcement for pre boarding. You know, anyone who needs, like, extra assistance, we went up, and when we got to the desk, they said, Oh, you want family boarding, not pre boarding, that's between groups a and b. And they sort of gestured to the side, and they said we could wait off to the side, basically right next to where the line was forming for group A. What's kind of funny is, I feel like maybe we should have known that about family boarding. But after having not traveled for two years because of the pandemic, I actually feel like I'm so out of practice with travel these days. And I don't know if this is the case for you two, but I feel really out of practice. I mean, the last time we flew with my son, he was six months old, and now he's two and a half. But anyway, I digress. So we're waiting off to the side, and my son is getting really antsy and really rowdy. I remember looking at my watch, and it was like, right at nap time, so he just gets kind of goofy, and he's pretty much just not listening to us at all. So while we're waiting there, off to the side, we're trying to get him to calm down and stay still, while also not looking like terrible parents. So the a group starts boarding, and as they do, my wife looks down in our boarding passes and realizes that we're actually in the a group like we could be boarding at that moment. But when I look up at the A line, it's so long, it's like 100 people long, and I just was like the thought of going all the way to the end of the line with my son, who won't even stay put where we are right now, you know, much less trying to get him to move in a line. I was just like, this is just not happening. I'm not taking him to the end of the A line. And of course, I'm also, like, annoyed at myself for not realizing that we had tickets in the a group, and so we could have been in this line the whole time, and we're standing right where the a group gets their boarding passes scanned. You know, we're like, right at the front of the line. And I just thought to myself, there's no way that these people are going to let me and my wife and my Unruly son who needs a nap, jump the line and get to the front like, not after they've been patiently waiting in this super long line, like normal people, but in the next moment, I'm not kidding you, I remembered what I learned in Vanessa's book, that people

Leah Neaderthal52:29

are actually more likely to say yes than you think, that people actually feel good about saying yes to requests, and that even though I felt so awkward and terrible asking to jump in line, the people I was asking most likely weren't thinking the same thing about me. And so I took a deep breath, I made eye contact with the woman who was in line and was, you know, about to walk up and scan her ticket, and I just said, Excuse me, would you mind if we jumped ahead? We're actually in group A and like, I had prepared this whole thing, right? But before I could even finish my sentence, the woman was like, Oh, of course. And she and her traveling companion made room for us to step in and let us in at the front of the line. And, of course, I was like, thanking them profusely. And all the time she was smiling and saying, oh, it's no big deal, you know, I'm happy to do it and on and on. And to me, this is what we're talking about around understanding the influence that we have and the ways that we decide to stop assuming that we have no influence, and instead the ways we start to understand and use our influence, not in trying to convince lots of people of big things, and certainly not for anything malicious, but the ways that we actually can exert a little bit of influence in small ways every day. So here's why this is important for your business, because when it comes to selling and getting more clients, we tend to assume that we have less power than we do, and it's one of the reasons why selling, why trying to actively get clients feels so uncomfortable, because it feels like someone else has all the power. And we've talked about power in a lot of past episodes, because there are many ways that you actually have more power than you think. And this is one of them, you have more influence than you think. So you can take up space. You can make a request, even a request that we might consider to be asking for a favor. We can ask for a higher dollar amount. You can do what we'd really call push back on a potential client, which is really just another way of saying that you can assert a small amount of influence so that things go your way versus someone else's way, and they're not going to be mad at you, they're not going to hate you, they're not going to fire you, because people are more likely to say yes than you think. And as Vanessa bond says, you have more influence than you think, and as I say in the sales process, you have more power than you think. You.

Leah Neaderthal55:04

Hey, everything we're talking about in this episode is part of the system. Women like you are learning in the academy. In the Academy, we help women consultants install the two systems. Every B to B consultant needs a marketing system to consistently attract the right clients and a sales system to lead a sales process to a yes and get paid more for every contract. So even if you've only gotten clients through referrals or word of mouth in the academy, you'll learn how to attract and sign clients outside your network, how to lead a sales process with confidence, and how to get paid for your value, not your time. And There's no cold calling or cold emailing involved, no changing your services or making a course, and you won't use any pushy sales tactics. That's just not our vibe. So if you like what you've heard here, the academy may be your right next step to learn how you can get these two systems in your consulting business and make progress faster and with fewer roadblocks. Head to smart gets paid.com/academy and apply, and we can chat about next steps. All right, see you over there. You. Transcribed by https://otter.ai