In this episode, Stephanie Richards and I dug into Erica Dhawan’s “Digital Body Language“.
You can listen to the episode here:
You can find Stephanie’s company SowGrow PR here, or find Stephanie on LinkedIn here.
Full Transcript:
Mickey: The loss of nonverbal body cues is among the most overlooked reasons why employees feel so disengaged from others. If used properly and at scale, empathetic body language equals employee engagement. Disengagement happens not because people don’t want to be empathetic, but because with today’s tools, they don’t know how.
So that was a quick snippet from Erica Dhwan’s book, digital body language. And here to discuss it today is Stephanie Richards. So Stephanie, welcome.
Stephanie: Thank you, Mickey. I appreciate you having me.
Mickey: Yeah, thank you. So as with every other book we do on this podcast, the person I’m having on the show is the one that gets to pick it. So you chose this book.
So why, what, what led you to choose to read this book and to want to share it with others?
Stephanie: Absolutely. So my background is in public relations. A lot of the study I did in college was about nonverbal communication, and this is so up my alley in terms of your reputation, your digital reputation, your personal branding and just how we communicate because that’s what public relations is. It’s communicating with editors and it’s communicating with clients.
And so it’s just, um, definitely, definitely a topic that covers a lot of different areas and where I work.
Mickey: Awesome. Very cool. So for those that haven’t read the book, I think it might be worth us discussing the four principles that Erica shares throughout the book. Um, they’re valuing visibly communicating carefully, collaborating confidently and trusting totally. So a little well written ones there, but let’s start with the first one and dig in just to each one a little bit.
So valuing visibly in short means explicitly showing that you’re attentive, aware, and appreciative because people again, don’t have the physical body language, but what else kind of goes into valuing visibly?
Stephanie: Absolutely. So, you know, if you think about when you’re communicating with somebody in terms of nonverbal communications, you lean forward, you make eye contact, you do all those things. And so this is talking a lot about how do you do that digitally? And some things that I think a lot of times get missed is something like how quickly do you respond to something? There are different preferences for people in terms of what’s too long to respond to a text message. Some people think, well, you got a text message, so you haven’t responded in 30 minutes. You’re ignoring it. Whereas other people, you know, they may not respond for days. And so we all have our own [00:02:00] interpretations of that. And none of this has really been codified. We’re all kind of just going on our own experiences.
Mickey: Mm hmm.
Stephanie: it’s interesting how she gives us a little bit more of a map. So if we all could agree on some of these things, or at least have some sort of etiquette around it, it may help some of this miscommunication that we often have to be as impactful.
Mickey: Yep. Yeah. Well said. Yeah. I may send you a text and expect a reply right away. And you may think two hours is perfectly fine to reply. And yeah, we’re suddenly mismatched and it becomes problematic. I also saw her talk in one of her Ted talks. She mentioned, um, practicing radical recognition. Whereas if you worked all weekend, we came in the office.
I would thank you so much for working. But if I send you a quick text saying thanks, like it just doesn’t feel the same. You gotta be radical about that recognition. Cause it’s harder to push it through.
Stephanie: Right, right.
Mickey: the second one she talked about, the second principle is communicating carefully. So what does that look like?
Okay.
Stephanie: the typo in it and we’re trying to interpret what it is or in a business setting. She used the example of if you have a zero or a [00:03:00] comma in the wrong place, now all of a sudden your numbers are off and that can have a huge impact on something. And so it’s, it’s one thing to speak and say something to be able to correct it immediately. Sometimes if you make a mistake digitally, you don’t always know it until later. Or maybe you don’t find out and the other person just assumes that that’s what it was supposed to be. And so it’s interesting how not having that immediate feedback, sometimes we don’t always realize that we make a mistake digitally.
So she’s suggesting that we just really read and make sure we proof everything and make sure it’s exactly what we want it to be before it goes out.
Mickey: Yep. The other thing I liked in this section, she talked about tone and if tone’s a problem, you should just assume the best intentions of the other person. It’s so hard to read tone. And so it’s easy to say to read it in a mean voice or whatever, but just if you read everything in a happy, thoughtful, empathetic voice, assume the best.
And then she says, assume intentions were good and respond with facts. So if you’re not sure if the intention was good or bad, assume it was good, but just be factual with your response and keep things good. Cause I think a lot of miscommunication happens there where someone sends a [00:04:00] perfectly polite message, but someone reads it.
It emphasizes the wrong word and reads it, you know, poorly and it can go downhill quickly. So assuming good intentions are good for life in general, but especially for digital communications.
Stephanie: Yeah, absolutely. We can have our own filters for what we think the relationship is and so we’re automatically going to read something negative into it if we have a negative sense.
Mickey: Yeah.
Stephanie: what I found so interesting is that, you know, if you go back when the digital world started something like using emojis and using exclamation points, especially like the old school English teachers would tell you, don’t use a bunch of exclamation point, exclamation points.
And, you know, even. I still hesitate a little bit to use emojis on LinkedIn
Mickey: Yeah.
Stephanie: I feel a little bit like it’s unprofessional. I’m just like, Oh, this is more of a text thing. And so, but she’s saying adopt those things because what we’re missing with the verbal communication, we’re missing all of those nonverbal cues. Those emojis are really there to help do that. They’re
Mickey: Right.
Stephanie: help make sure like, Hey, I put a smiley face on this because you can’t see me smiling, but I’m really smiling behind this [00:05:00] keyboard.
Mickey: Right.
Stephanie: even just the exclamation points, which, you know, those of us who have a writing background, we kind of cringe a little bit, but I think we have to just realize that this is, this is moving forward.
This is the new world, and if you don’t catch up, you’re going to be behind. Like, I still to this day see people do the double spaces behind
Mickey: I was just going to say that. Yeah. I wonder if you were,
Stephanie: Have you
Mickey: that took me years to break. That was trained so hard to do double spaces after sentences, but yeah,
Stephanie: Yes. Every once in a while, I will still see that. And that’s just a sign. That’s like, that’s like your digital. Persona that she talks about.
If you have a double space behind your, um, sentences, you are immediately know what era that’s
Mickey: exactly. Oh yeah.
Stephanie: your digital persona. It’s really funny.
Mickey: I took my keyboarding classes back in the nineties when that was a class in high school to learn how to type properly. And they, they drilled that into us double space, which
Stephanie: space.
Mickey: not anymore. Uh, her third principle is collaborating confidently. So tell us a bit about that one. Yep.
Stephanie: a lot of it has to do with just teamwork. So she’s talking a lot about, you You know, making sure that everybody is contributing, [00:06:00] making sure that people feel like they can contribute and that there’s space for them, and figuring out, um, what channels make the most sense for that form of communication.
And it’s, it’s helpful to stop and think through those things, because a lot of times we’ll just, you know, shoot off a text message or shoot off an email, and we’re not always thinking about, um, you know, is this the right medium? Am I working as a team here? So there’s a lot of different things that we need to pause and think a little bit more about, about what we’re doing in those areas.
Mickey: Good point. Yeah. Using the right medium is tough because I want to default to email every time because that’s what I prefer, but that’s not always the best solution. I think it often is, but not always. So, yeah. And then, yeah.
Stephanie: great guidelines about, you know, here’s when you would use a text message, here’s when you would use email. And it’s, it’s helpful to just be able to have a little bit of confidence in that and going, okay, this make, this, I can look at this and say, this is more of a text, this is more of an email conversation.
And
Mickey: Yep.
Stephanie: it takes some of the ambiguity out of that.
Mickey: Yeah. And I think phone calls probably fall into that too, where I think the older you are, the more likely you are to pick up the phone and the younger you are, the more likely you are to [00:07:00] ignore every phone call that comes in. So
Stephanie: Yes,
Mickey: that balance is tricky too. Right,
Stephanie: as an interruption, as an intrusion, or as something that causes them anxiety because they’re thinking, Oh no, somebody’s hurt, something’s wrong, there’s an emergency, because why are you calling me? And so, you know, the generations that grew up with the phone, it’s not that big of a deal. And I intentionally will just call my friends out of the blue, Just to maintain that connection, even though it’s not common anymore, but just so that when I call them, it’s not an emergency. So they know, Hey, Stephanie, just call him to say, Hey, it’s
Mickey: right.
Stephanie: you know, like it’s some emergency, but yeah, that’s, that’s definitely a divide in the, in the business world, the younger generation and the older
Mickey: Yeah. I’ve seen it, seen it listed as the hierarchy of attention. Like how quickly should you respond? Which you mentioned a little bit too. Like if I send you something in the mail. I expect you to respond in a couple of days. If I send you an email, I expect a couple of hours. If I send you a text, I expect a couple of minutes.
But if you call, you’re saying drop everything right now and answer. And that’s where I think people see the interruptions. Even a text, you can brush off, finish what you’re doing and engage. But a call is, is different. But it’s also [00:08:00] often the best way to communicate too. To actually have the tone of voice.
And you’re not having to assume tone or any of that kind of stuff. So it’s a tricky thing for sure.
Stephanie: Right. It’s a
Mickey: Um,
Stephanie: art to be on the phone now.
Mickey: Yes, for sure. Uh, last principle she shares is trusting totally. Tell us what you got there.
Stephanie: Right, absolutely. So, you know, building trust over the digital mediums is kind of hard. And I think you have to go that extra mile to put things in there to make people feel comfortable. And she said some things about, somebody had a template that they use across the board to really make sure that everybody has the same level playing field. And different things like that can, can help take some of the ambiguity out of it. Um, but even just making sure that people have the space to say things, making sure that people are included. So let’s say introverts are not comfortable speaking up in a Zoom meeting. Then maybe you have some sort of process at the end where people give some of their feedback over email at the end.
And being able to understand that, you know, some people are going to feel comfortable, um, doing certain communication channels [00:09:00] and some people aren’t. But making sure that it’s a level playing field for everybody and inviting that feedback. Whichever channel of communication makes the most sense for those people is, is something that I thought was, was a good point that she made.
Mickey: Yeah, I saw somewhere, she said maybe in that Ted talk, but about how some businesses in their zoom meetings, they’ll ask people to give their thoughts in the text, like in the chat on the side, and then they’ll call on some of the better answers there. So that way people aren’t intimidated to speak up.
Everyone puts it in there and then they can call on them. The person to do that. I think it also helps to pay attention to who’s not speaking up enough. Um, Allie, my business partner does a great job of that in team meetings. She’ll toward the end. So, okay, Brooke, I haven’t heard much from you yet. You’ve been quiet.
Well, you know, what do you want to, what do you think about this situation we’re talking about? And often the quiet people have by far the best insights because they’ve been listening so patiently to see what’s going on, but you have to pull that out because otherwise they’ll just be happy to sit there and let the call in and move on with their life.
So,
Stephanie: Right. Absolutely. And I think she makes a great point about being very upfront and setting things, um, out there so that everybody’s on the same page. So, you know, if you talk about your missions and your values and you talk about, you know, the protocol, I [00:10:00] think it helps to build that trust because everybody knows what’s happening and then you follow through with those things.
And so there’s a lot there in terms of just setting the stage and setting standards and saying, you know, we, we want everybody to contribute. So that’s part of our process when we do the meetings and, and just have that as part of your protocol.
Mickey: yeah,
Stephanie: so the more that you establish that, I think it builds up trust that everybody knows, because it’s hard to have trust if you walk into a room and you don’t know what’s happening.
You
Mickey: right. Oh, for sure.
Stephanie: you don’t know what’s happening. It’s hard to trust, should I send this email? Should I not send this email? So the more, I think, light you can shed on that path, I think it helps create a safer environment for people to communicate.
Mickey: Yep. Well said. I like that. Yeah. So those are the four principles. Valuing visibly, communicating carefully, collaborating confidently, and trusting totally. So you’re a PR person slash digital branding, and you’ve seen a lot of that sort of through this. How do you think digital body language affects personal branding and things of that nature?
Stephanie: So I felt like this book was on the digital side about texting, typing, communicating. verbally, um, or, or in the written form. And thought that married so well [00:11:00] with the other side of things that I do with public relations, which is the non verbal side on video. So,
Mickey: Mm hmm.
Stephanie: I work with people when they go on camera, what are you communicating non verbally? And because everything is so digital now, that’s really become a huge part of our, our personal branding.
Mickey: Yep.
Stephanie: you know, if you think about, you know, what is your background? What are you wearing? What are the colors are you wearing? What, how does that communicate? Who you are to other people and you can think of it in terms of like the digital side of things as one You know, she even talked about like having a low resolution photo and how that can um Reflect negatively on you if that’s your linkedin profile.
It’s really low
Mickey: Yep.
Stephanie: I think of that in terms of like your personal branding on camera if you have a low resolution Image, you know, you’re you’re just kind of throwing on something That’s not really appropriate for on camera or your background isn’t really professional or whatever it might be That gives you a low resolution brand And it’s your digital brand in the sense that it’s video, but everything is video now.
So we
Mickey: Oh yeah.
Stephanie: think about that as well. So it’s not just [00:12:00] the, you know, text that we’re writing, but it’s also communicating with people and building real relationships over video as well.
Mickey: Yep. I like that. Yeah. I take most of these calls from my home office and I’ve worked very hard on my background there and I met the office today. So the background here is not quite as good, but your background very clearly has been built for, for video calls. I mean, it seems very intentional to me. Uh, for those of you listening to this, you can, if you look me up on LinkedIn, I’ll share some video clips and you can see what I’m talking about here.
But it’s definitely very clearly has thought about that with her background and with the flowers and the books and the, Artwork. It looks fantastic. So it’s a good, good setup you have going there for sure.
Stephanie: Appreciate that.
Mickey: So the other piece of the book, uh, she gives five core strategies for good body, good digital body language, uh, which kind of overlaps, it feels like to me, the four principles of it.
So I don’t think we’ll go as deep into these, but I think it’s worth hitting these five strategies. So the first one is brevity creates confusion, uh, short, succinct communication can feel cold and dismissive. Uh, so any, any thoughts on that one?
Stephanie: I can be guilty of this because a lot of times I’m shooting off emails and I remember [00:13:00] the lady that works with me, Sarah, I’ve, I’ve had the conversation with her. If you get a one sentence email from me, it’s not because I’m trying to be rude. It’s just, I needed to just get something done. And I told her that years ago.
And so there was a, at least an understanding there, but you know, more recently I’ve tried to start a little bit more with, uh, hello, how are you? How was your weekend? And, you know, still be brief and to the point, but, but be a little bit more personal in it. And, you know, I communicate a lot with CEOs and so.
So, they don’t want a long email
Mickey: Right.
Stephanie: much time to read it. And so, just really focusing on bullet points and structure and reading the email and going back through it and seeing how can you simplify and how can you cut it down. even thinking about, maybe this is two emails. Maybe these are two separate issues, so keep it short, but, you know, do two emails instead of one.
That way you can still keep it short, but you’re not keeping it so short that it’s rude. So, It’s a little more digestible, and then
Mickey: Yeah.
Stephanie: it in a chunk, so I have found that to be helpful.
Mickey: Yeah. I like that too. It feels weird to send more emails, but it gets even weirder when you have like [00:14:00] five things to say, and then they try to reply to all five of the same email just becomes a mess. Um, in the book, she talked about an anecdote too, with a leader who sent a no subject calendar invite to a colleague who had recently heard about budget cuts.
And so with no subject line, they figured, well, this is it, this is we’re, we’re done. And it was just, yeah, a brief message and a clear message or not the same thing. We did the same thing with us during COVID early on in COVID a few months in, we did And we saw other agencies struggling. We were in good shape, just fortunately it was more luck than anything, but the way our, our client base was, we wanted to tell the team was going.
So I sent a calendar invite to the team saying, um, let’s, let’s talk about, you know, the state, the state of the melon is what we called it. And that’s all we said though. And so they were like, Oh gosh, it’s over. We’re all talking Tuesday about the state of the company. Like we’re gone. Like it’s like, no, no, it’s okay.
We promise it’s good, but it was, yeah, we tried to be succinct and cute and that did not work out real well there. So,
Stephanie: Right. My husband did that to me not too long ago. He sent me some text, something about like, we need to talk about something, and you know, let me know when you’re out of your meeting or off the phone call or whatever, and I was, you know, thinking all the things in my head like, if somebody hurt, did you get fired?
Like
Mickey: right.
Stephanie: I [00:15:00] had all this panic and it was just something that he wanted to share with me. It was nothing that was, you know, terrible and I just I said don’t ever do that again because it’s just it creates that anxiety
Mickey: Oh yeah.
Stephanie: fill in the gap. So yeah. I try to at least, you know, give some indication of, you know, what is this meeting and and that sort of thing because, yeah,
Mickey: Yep.
Stephanie: definitely create anxiety.
Mickey: Yeah, so that first strategy was brevity creates confusion, but again, we’re not saying to be super long with everything, but there’s a balance of not being too quick. Uh, the second strategy is communicate your mind, heavy, communicate your mind mindset. So expressing yourself clearly. How does that differ from the previous one we talked about?
Stephanie: Yeah, you know, I think we have to be really careful what words we choose and You know how we choose them and even the structure of the way that you Present information can also change things So I think her her big point is just be really careful and thoughtful about what we do Don’t just blow through things So,
Mickey: Mm hmm.
Stephanie: do have a really difficult email that you have to send or maybe it’s a really heavy topic Maybe don’t send an email.
Maybe [00:16:00] that’s a phone call
Mickey: Yeah.
Stephanie: you know because you may not be able to communicate it clearly in an email So I think it just comes down to really being thoughtful and really being careful You and maybe even have somebody else look over it too, because maybe we have a filter maybe before we send a really important email, have somebody else say, is this clear?
Should
Mickey: Oh yeah.
Stephanie: something? And
Mickey: do that a lot. Let’s say, yeah, we’ll pay something in Slack. I’m about to send this email to the client. What do you think? And they’ll tweak a few words and yeah, yeah. We played with email clients over the years. We can actually go into each other’s, like, share an email in your inbox with people.
Spark, I think, and others have that, but we didn’t care for the overall software. But man, the idea of that was fantastic to have that, you know.
Stephanie: Yeah, that’s a great
Mickey: Yeah, it would be great. We just couldn’t find the right one. Related to that is the third one. Hold your horses. Um, so just taking your time to give a response. You don’t feel like you have to respond right away, which is, I struggle with that bad.
I’m all about inbox zero and getting things cleared out. And so that leads to too much brevity and not holding my horses and yeah, all that stuff to get it out. So there’s kind of a balance there. It also goes back to not waiting too long either. You know, you don’t want to hold your horses for a week to respond to that [00:17:00] email when people are expecting response sooner.
So it’s, how do you, how do you balance that? How do you find the line between responding quickly enough, but not just firing back without thinking? Yep.
Stephanie: said about send a quick text to acknowledge that you received it. So let’s say there’s something that you need to think about and you’re not quite ready to respond, but just saying, I received your text. get back with you as soon as I can. And that way, somebody is not sitting there just wondering.
They know that you received it,
Mickey: Yep.
Stephanie: at least you don’t feel like you have to just shoot off an email or a text before you’re ready. So I thought that was a really helpful tip that she gave.
Mickey: Yeah, I like that. Yeah, we have about 200 websites we manage. They send in tickets all the time to Amanda. She answers and she gets back quickly, but there’s times where she can’t. And so we’ve looked at how can we best do that? And that’s basically what she does on a lot of right back and say, Stephanie got your ticket.
Ashley’s out for a couple hours. We’re gonna work on it this afternoon. We’ll get back to you with it then, because we also played with just auto responders. Just Hey, we got your ticket. We’re gonna look at it later. But we all know that those air fake. And did they really get it? Are they really gonna look at it?
So we’ve opted not to do that. But Amanda, Either response quickly saying it’s done. Cause most of the tickets [00:18:00] we get are just changes picture or whatever, but it was something bigger. Yeah. We do try to do that. Jump in and say, Hey, we got it. We’re looking at it. We’ll be back to you. It may, may take a couple hours, but we’re there.
And then that way they can relax and then we have it and they can move on with their day. So yeah, I like that. That’s a good, good point with text too. Yeah.
Stephanie: And I think that’s important point because so many things are automated emails, automated
Mickey: Mm hmm.
Stephanie: automated, and so being able to communicate with a real person is what we all want, especially if there’s some sort of service requests that we have or something like that. We want to know that a real human being saw it. So, I think even scaling it down and not just having everything automated, but having those personal responses, I think can go a long way in building up your, your digital brand as well.
Mickey: Oh yeah, I’ve written a few times on my blog about automation and despite being a digital marketing firm, I push against automation a lot. I mean, there’s certainly places for it. If someone submits a tick, uh, uh, inquiry on our website, it goes in our CRM automatically and some of that stuff. But yeah, too, too much is being automated, I think, and just taking the time to talk to humans and can be a great thing.
And I think it also helps that for both of our businesses, we work with relatively few clients compared to, [00:19:00] you know, someone that’s selling a million widgets a year or something like we can take the time to be more manual. I think if you’re selling. Again, a million widgets. You have to have a lot more automation just to deal with the flow, but.
In most of our cases, people automate just because they can when they probably shouldn’t. I mean, you should just talk to people and do it the right way. So,
Stephanie: Right.
Mickey: um, the fourth one in here, we talked about a little bit already, but assume the best intent. I don’t even think we need to go in here necessarily. I think it’s always trying to interpret communications from the others with ideal intent, assume the best of people.
And I think Alex kind of gets on me cause I’m almost too good about that. I’m too trusting. And you know, if someone will yell at me, I’m like, they didn’t mean it, but yeah, so there’s certainly a balance there. But. Assuming better intent is always going to lead to a better outcome. Uh, but the fifth one here is find your voice, paying attention to how you communicate.
Tell me more about how someone could find their voice for improved digital body language.
Stephanie: Right. So, as a writer, I think that this is something that people need to think about because you can write in a really casual tone. You can write in a really formal tone. Like, I tend to be a little bit formal. I’m a
Mickey: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.[00:20:00]
Stephanie: too cold. So I think you have to really think, who are you? What’s authentic to you? Because a lot of people, you know, may have a mismatch. They may be, um, you know, being overly casual just because they’re not thinking about it. Or they may be too formal and stuffy and they’re really a friendly person in real life.
And so, you know, just making sure that you understand who you are and what do you want your message to be? What do you want to be known for? It goes back to that personal branding. You really have to think about, what is my digital personal brand in that area? And then thinking through, well, what are those things?
Do I use exclamation points? Do I use, you know, um, really fancy language or, you know, like the one she talked about you do a greeting. She talked about, do you say, Hey, in the email? And she said, that’s such a common thing now. And again, as a writer, I’m like, Oh, I wouldn’t write an email to a CEO and say, Hey, Tim or whatever,
Mickey: Right.
Stephanie: so, but I’ve thought about this because I go back and forth between hi and hello when I talk to editors. And I typically do hello because I feel like it’s a little more respectful than just hi. I feel like hi is like, I know you and you know, I’m, [00:21:00] I’m making a presumption here, but I feel like hello is a little more respectful, but still friendly. So I think about these things. I think people need to figure out, you know, where do they fall on that spectrum and where do they want to be?
And does that align?
Mickey: Gotcha. Awesome. I love that. So yeah, the five core strategies for good digital body language. Yeah, they were brevity. Brevity creates confusion. It communicate your mind, mindset, hold your horses, assume the best intent. And find your voice. So a lot in this book and we covered just a fraction of it. There’s so much good stuff in here, but we’re about out of time here.
So Stephanie, how can people find you and see more of more of your formal writing and all the great stuff that you do and connect with you?
Stephanie: Absolutely. So my public relations firm is SoGrow PR. It’s so like you sow seeds, S O W G R O W P R. And then my consulting side is OnCameraFashion.com.
Mickey: Awesome. Appreciate it. Thank you so much for your time. This was great. Thank you.
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