Webinar: High Stakes Conversations: Skills for Interviews, Digital Meetings, and Using Your Virtual Voice

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Alright, well let's go ahead and get started. Hello and welcome to the Illinois Wesleyan University Titan talks webinars series class of 2020 addition. I am cerave or an I'm the event coordinator in the office of alumni engagement were excited about the opportunity to partner with the Young Alumni Council to provide this forum highlighting our alumni who will provide insight and wisdom to the class of 2020.

Just a few housekeeping items before I hand it over to our speakers. There will be a brief Q&A after their remarks. Please use the chat tool to send any questions you may have. I know they'll also try to answer throughout the web and are also in case you have to leave early. This web and R will be recorded and posted later for future viewing and sharing with others, and now I'd like to introduce our speakers Casey Aaron Clark class of 2004 anjuli fog are Co. Founders of vital voice training with the mission to create.

A new paradigm for affective communication and start to change how we talk to each other. How we really listen and how we collaborate to help everyone understand the power of their voice. So take it away.

Yeah.

Thank you so much Sarah. So when I saw Adrian put out the call for events for the graduating seniors, I immediately jump on it 'cause I wanted to talk to you all about what we do and how. Hopefully it can. We can bring some helpful information to you in this kind of uncertain time, and May I just say that it is entirely a bummer that this is how.

Your senior year is ending. For those of you who are not seniors. Thank you so much for joining us. Um, I'm Casey, my I'm coming in from New York City.

So we actually wanted to start out by giving people the opportunity to ask questions or to just tell us what it is that you're hoping to get out of today. And you can do that right in the chat box and you know, we can. We can get to those questions, or we can make sure that we try to address those things. We've got a fast and furious time with you, so we want to go over several things that we believe are going to be helpful right now. With the way the world is working and also.

Will be helpful later when we aren't just communicating digitally. All of the all of our work translates Fortunately to to all venues. I would like to think so we're going to give you some basics. We're going to talk about nerves and stress and stressful conversations in particular and going to give you just a little bit of an intro. Hopefully if we have some time into the idea of communication, core values, so we're going to start with what we call your voice 101 so.

When when we talk about the human voice and we talk about voice and communication were talking about something that is incredibly complex, it's the reason why tips and tricks don't work. They don't work for public speaking, they don't work for communication, they don't work for interview situations, tips and tricks. Ignore the fact that everything about this is incredibly nuanced, so we're going to go through the four arenas of your voice, the physical, the mental.

Motional and the social so will start with a little brief overview of the physical voice and the way that the physical voice works. It's a four step process so it starts with the impulse to speak. So if we were in a live workshop right now, I would ask for all of you to say the month that you were born on the count of three. Let's do it in our respective apartments, you know, wherever we're logging in from so month you were born 123 July.

So I asked you a very easy question. Uh, with a very easy answer, but even with that you still had a thought you would spark of inspiration that sent a signal to your lungs to check and see if they have air in them. So step number one is the impulse step, #2 is breath. We're going to get way more into that later, but rest assured that breath is very important on the Exhale. We begin to get a little bit of vibration in the vocal cord, so if everybody just puts your fingertips on the front of your throat.

And just give me a little hum again wherever you are going to trust that you're doing this with me.

And you might feel just a little bit of buzz underneath your fingertips. Those are your vocal cords and your vocal cords are very small. If you look at your thumbnail there about as long as your thumbnail is wide their mucous membranes, they vibrate up to 440 times a second and they wave together like this. Now on their own, the vibration that's step #3 impulse breath, vibration, the vibration that your vocal cords makes on their own is very small.

So what actually then takes your voice out into the world is a combination of that air pressure. That vibration meeting your resonators and your resonators are all the hard Bony places of your upper body. If any of you are are singers, you'll be very familiar with this. If any of you are musicians, right? We have the strings of the guitar that get amplified by the wooden body of the guitar. We have the strings of the piano amplified by the wooden body of the piano. We know from basic physics that sound bounces off of hard surfaces and it's absorbed into soft surfaces.

The same place. It's the same thing with your upper body, right? So the hard Bony places up your upper body are resonating chambers for your voice. So when we say your voice is a full body instrument were being literal, but we often think of our voices coming from here or coming from here and forget that we have this whole body that helps us to create sound and send it out into the world. So a lot of what gets in the way of that are the other pieces of the your voice 101 puzzle. So I'm going to let Julie tell you about the mental aspects.

And the emotional aspects of voice.

Nude

That so.

All of the habits that we create physically, mentally and emotionally are deeply affected by the social piece of voice. So the more that we, Julian I dig into this piece of the vocal puzzle, the more important it turns out that it is to everything the way that we develop our voices in the way that we develop. Our communication styles, the way we develop, our response to difficult conversations in our response to stress in our response to emotions is all in concert with other human beings nobody like.

Creates a voice on their own, an sets out to annoy other people. Our deepest human instinct is survival. That's your primal brain and success. That's your prefrontal cortex, right? And we get clues from our environment on how that works. We get clues of what who is considered intelligent and who's considered dumb. Who is considered a leader and who's considered a follower who is considered charismatic and who's considered boring? And we make adjustments on a conscious and subconscious level in order to.

Fit in or stand out depending on the circumstance. So often times we make these vocal choices and we create these vocal and communication habits in one environment and they'll work really really well and then sometimes will go into a different environment like moving from college into the quote, unquote real world, which is a condescending thing, but will set that aside.

Moving into the real adult world is going to mean that you're gonna change communication. Micro societies here, and you're going to change them rapidly. Your friend group in college an your hopefully friend group at work will be different. There will be different rules of engagement and we as human beings are great at adapting to these circumstances. But we're also really great at creating habits and then not examining those habits. So where we come in as coaches is helping you explore.

The whole pallet of what you have available to you have you get to know your own habits. Have you get to know your own Physiology in a particularly what happens when we get into those moments of stress and make empowered choices to show up the way that you want to. So we're going to spend the rest of the workshop giving you some ways to do that. Some concrete ways we will not call them tips and tricks, but we will call them principles of how and tools that you can bring to these different situations in order to make choices that feel good to you and feel like they honor who you are and.

Do you want to be in the world a particularly as you start on this path out of college and into like Adult Life, which is a real thing. So we're going to start with the tool of breath because it's the most important thing that you don't know is that important. We don't think about breathing. If we had to think about breathing, we'd never get anything else done right? But your breath is worth thinking about, so I'm going to throw to Julie now so she can tell you a little bit more about breath.

And I had my microphone off so you couldn't hear me either. That's cool. We're rolling with the punches, you guys. This is the.

So so yeah, so so we we use our our breath or lack of breath to manage our emotions and to manage other people's impressions of our emotions. We often have this idea that like if they don't see me have an emotion that they won't be able to perceive that I'm having an emotion, but all of us have been in a conversation with that person. That they're like, I'm not mad. I'm totally not bad and you instinctively go Oh there about to blow up right? Because we all have an internal BS meter.

We all have the ability to sense on a deep level how someone is feeling so when it comes to feeling strong emotions.

The societally acceptable way to deal with that is to shove them down right to be socially cooperative and show them, but it's actually not affective. It doesn't create rip or an. It doesn't create trust, and it doesn't create, and it doesn't help you manage the emotions, because guess what? They're gonna come out at some point in time. They may not come out in that scenario, but they will come out because that's how physiological reactions work. So let's talk a little bit about how to get a pleasurable breath since we try to make the distinction between a deep breath.

Anna pleasurable brathering easy breath because when we say deep breath, what usually happens when we ask someone to demonstrate a deep breath for us as they do this?

And it's labored, and it involves a lot of up and down in the shoulders.

And it's not actually very efficient, and it's also not pleasant. It doesn't feel good, right? Or people are like, oh, I remember Class. I know where I'm supposed to breathe and they give us this like big Exhale in the belly.

Well, here's the thing about stress. When you are stressed out, you cannot release your belly. And here is why, because your amygdala, the sort of Control Center for your stress hormones, does not want you to release your soft bits to predators so that a lion can come around the corner and eviscerate you right? So we can't get a yoga belly breath when we're stressed out and breathing into our shoulders is not efficient, and it's not pleasurable. So, OK, so our shoulders are our bellies out. Where do we get an efficient breath?

The answer is in your rib cage, so I'm going to trust again that you guys are all doing this since I can't see you so I just want you to take care of your hands and just poke into your rib cage like fill your side ribs, failure back ribs you know you got a rib cage in the front. It's all protecting all of your lungs, which criswell thinking a lot about right now the zip code 19.

Your lungs are designed very beautifully to expand in 360 degrees, they expand down and out, raising your shoulders and you breathe is kind of like blowing up a balloon and expecting it to hit your face and not go anywhere else. Um, when we breathe, we want to breathe down an more importantly out. Your rib cage is designed to swing apart and come back together, swing apart, and come back together. You're back in your scapula, your shoulder blades in your back are designed to swing apart.

And come back together. But just for a moment, we're going to do this quickly. Just put her hands on the side of your ribs right underneath your armpits and I'm going to give you the direction. Breathe into your armpits. Your shoulders get to stay heavy and relax.

You can see a little bit of Mika singer ribs. Thank you. Illinois Wesleyan Musical Theatre Department for my singer moves.

Sure, you can hear the sirens in the background. This is milk in New York City right now.

So practice that rib swing breath, uh, we will send some resources in a follow-up, including a video that has a really beautiful animation of the way that the body moves and an effective breath. But knowing that you have the ability to expand.

When you breathe, will send a signal to your amygdala that you are safe and not under threat. This is one of the many ways that breath helps us. So with that, let's talk a little bit more about the Amygdala. Let's talk about those high stress situations and let's talk particularly about nerves and ear.

So this is what we always say.

Nerves are natural. Nerves are your brain doing a brain thing?

When it precedes a stressor in the environment, your body, your brain is going to react. When they said send a cascade of physical signals to the rest of your body and I'm doing. I'm going to throw it to you here and let you talk about nerves here.

And.

This metaphors make me so happy all right. So the.

The thing to internalize from this basically is that nerves are not a comment on your character. Nerves are not a comment on your ability there, not a comment on whether or not you belong in the room there. Not a comment on whether or not you'll ever be good at this, right? People take nerves as a sign from the universe, right? It means that I didn't do a good job or I'm not going to do a good job and instead we have the opportunity reframe that as a physical signal. So let's talk about kind of the.

Roads that are nerves want to take us down to mention fight, flight and freeze. We want to add a fourth F to this and that is fun. So if you are typically this and this is where again the self knowledge comes into play 'cause we're starting to look at like what is my response when I start to get nervous amiah fighter am I do what I prefer to fly away. am I the kind of person that freezes or my the kind of person? And often this is women who is socialized to like sued the predator so that they will not eat me, right?

So so fight is that feeling of I hate everyone in this room?

Uhm, I am so angry right now. I wish they would all die, right flight is get me the hell outta here or I can't wait for this to be over often that manifests in a speeding up or rushing through something in order to get done with it freezes the brain going blank. We all know what that feels like and freeze is interesting because it is both the first instinctual response as we're assessing a threat after which will go down to these pads. It's also the end response when things get so extreme.

That we end up literally. It's your body playing dead to facilitate a painless death. And then there's Phan. Anh Phan. Is that instinct of playing nice? It's that instinct of soothing the Savage Beast in front of you. Write an A lot of times, particularly women are rewarded for that behavior, so it's a behavior that ends up coming out for us a lot.

Exactly exactly so. So as we get into these high stakes conversations with these instinctual responses tends to be where our prefrontal cortex shuts off.

And an our bodies are in control, right? Our primal brain is in control because you don't need a prefrontal cortex to run away and you don't need a prefrontal cortex to punch somebody. Basically, all you need is to run away or to punch right. So in order to get our prefrontal cortex back online, that's when we do things like breathe. It's that's what that's when we do things like reconnect with the moment and what it is that we're trying to do to get that for you. First Cortex back online and there are. There are a few ways to do that. The 1st way that we're going to talk about.

Is literally a physical way to do that is taking space right? Because when we're in a stressful situation, we tend to either shrink or blow up depending on our circuits, and there is an alternative to those that does not involve shrinking away and it does not involve having to make yourself bigger than the other person. I'm going to talk about how that manifests energetically later, but let's talk about how to get a place of I'm taking space and I'm sharing space and we have a mantra that we would like for all of you to internalize and take into your daily lives.

You want me to hashtag? We want to make T shirts out of it. It's a whole thing and that is hashtag. Let your butt be big.

Julie, would you like to explain how they can let their but be big and why it's a good thing?

Select lead you through just a little exercise on how you can find letting your butt be big. OK, so everybody just for a moment, uh, give me an extreme version of good posture. This is what we tend to call good girl posture and of course men can do it too, but but it is definitely something that we see a lot on women, right? So it's very upright. It's very like I'm very prepared and I'm eager an I'm a perfectionist and I'm going to show up beautifully and I'm getting ready to leave in if I need to lean in right? So it's very up wait?

And everything in Little Sweeties, right? So now I want you to drop it completely and go ahead and just melt for a set. Do the total opposite of this right? So this might be like not appropriate costume for the moment. So now we gotta find the place in between those two places, because postures, a direction, not a destination. So wherever you're sitting right now, just kind of rolled back and forth on your sets bones a little bit. Just like literally feel the bones of your butt and all that flesh and muscle that's in the way, and you can roll forward and back.

And forward and back inside the side and just see if you can find your center point right and then just allow. And this is very hard for my perfectionists.

Allow your body to have that weight in the chair, so then out of that comes a lift, not a lifting hold but a lift at his energized and now your body has the possibility of movement, which is very powerful. It feels powerful. It looks powerful, but it doesn't have to be that exaggerated power of fight, and it doesn't have to be the shrink of flight or freeze, it's just centered, it's sharing space.

So now we're going to talk about, In addition to the physical taking of space, the energetic taking of space, because it's a really important piece, particularly when it comes to difficult conversations. And actually, it's particularly apropos for digital conversations, because it's a little harder to perceive this stuff digitally. But all of this is going to work in real life. Do we promise we're going to introduce you to a concept called the three circles? So this is from a voice teacher named Patsy Roberg. Patsy is a brilliant voice.

An acting teacher from England and she has an idea called the three circles. It's about the energy of communication between people between two people in a one on one conversation or between one person who's speaking and a whole audience. So please tell us about first circle moving from cats to dogs. Now in terms of our imagery here. So so 1st circle puppy here.

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1st circle can be powerful, uncertain people, but typically are people who have powder external reasons. They have power because of a title. They have powers of the position, right? So the example that we always use is on a winter right? So the editor, Vogue magazine just got the helmet of hair sunglasses and she's like you will come to me. I will not come to you, right? There's a certain power in that, but that is external power. Meeting 1st circle and it's a very different thing. Most of us when we're young don't have that kind of power. We might have it in areas of our life. We don't have it in a job interview. We don't have it. It'll work typically.

So on the other end of scale is 3rd circle.

There are two calenergy like the people who are just like really loud and they're controlling the room, and they're kind of blasting or energy out in this really huge way. We're not only talking to you, they're talking at you, and it's really not at all about how their words are landing. It's about how loud and how much they can do and how much they can control, right? And whenever I do, yeah one up contest, right? It can be where the fight responses. Definitely it's the yell. It's the aggression, right? Whenever I do this demonstration alive workshop, it's always fascinating to watch people.

Literally shrink away from me and there sometimes, and it's obvious that I'm doing something that's a little silly, so there's often some gets involved with it, but we've been on the receiving end of 3rd Circle Energy, and we know that it's not fun. It feels like someone overpowering you and where it was really helpful to recognize this for myself was when I realized 3rd circle enerji doesn't always come from a place of anger, or from places fight. Sometimes it comes from a place of over enthusiasm. It comes from a place of trying desperately to prove yourself.

It comes from those places like I want to show you that I'm enthusiastic. I want to show you that I'm prepared. I want to show you that I'm this right. It's the performance energy that is not always appropriate to the situation. And it's particularly not appropriate to the situation when all your doing is doing is sending enerji outwards an you're not receiving energy back. These in order to have effective communication, we have to receive enerji back from the people that were talking to we cannot.

Be affective if it's all outwards and we cannot be affected. If it's all inwards, it has to be a sharing so that is 2nd Circle energy.

We're getting 2nd circle, yeah?

So 2nd Circle Energy is the energy of that sharing. It's the energy of back and forth. It's the energy of presence when someone says oh, that person has like it factor or there there they have charisma what they're often talking about is 2nd circle. They're talking about a person's ability to show up fully, and also to make the other people in the room feel like they are also part of the story that they are also part of the experience. If you can help someone feel.

Seen and heard you have gone such a long way toward establishing repor, establishing trust and often disarming a stressful situation. It's one of the reasons why kind of a core tool of of negotiation is saying, like I hear you, I hear what you're saying or or am I understanding you correctly? Is this what you mean by this when we're clarifying meaning we're helping the other person feel, seen and heard.

And what that does is it gives us the power to to be present with them to connect with them. It also gives us the power to observe what's working and what's not working and make different choices and go down different paths as opposed to kind of doing the thing that we often do when we get stressed out. Which is like just do the thing that we're doing. But like do it harder. It's kind of like talking to somebody who doesn't know English, and so your response to that is by like talking louder and slower.

As if suddenly that's going to make them understand English. We do the same thing in in communication. On a more metaphorical level, fairly often just do the same thing harder as opposed to the kind of presence that allows us to make intentional shifts.

Julie, I think you're going in and out right now, so I'm I want to give you a chance to jump in here but.

Do we have you?

We got you OK great.

Yeah.

Yeah, technology.

Yeah, let's do that.

So we're going to end this workshop with a just a little brief introduction on something that we talk with all of our private clients about. And that's the idea of communication core values. So one of the again, as you've noticed at through all of this, a lot of this is about under starting to understand your own habits, both when you are at your best and when you are stressed. Communication core values are a way of starting to do the kind of navel gazing and self examination, and that helps you.

Articulate your own strengths and this is something that we have to do, especially as we're going out into the world and doing interviews or trying to join new organizations. We have to know what we're good at. We have to know what our habits are. We have to know what our tendencies are so that we can work with those things. So your communication core values are how you want to present yourself or how you want to feel and or the effect you want to have on other people or how you want them to feel. And I'm going to give you a little bit of homework to do.

We're going to send, uh.

Adrian and Sarah. Is there a way for us to get people up a PDF after this is over?

Hopefully there will be well will address that in a minute, but if we don't, absolutely yes. So we were going to send you all a mini version of our core communication values workbook which will help you to start to articulate what are my strengths. What am I good at as a computer? As a communicator, what makes me me what? How do I want people to feel and How do I want to feel? So for me one of my communication strengths and my communication core values is warmth. I'm really good at.

Helping people to feel welcome. I'm really good at. Helping to people to get excited about something I'm good at. Going into new rooms and using my extrovert powers for good and not for evil, right, uh, and and we also like to talk about the idea with these communication strengths that all of our strings also have a dark side. They haven't called the evil twin communication, superpowers and evil Twins, so these sort of evil twin side of my warmth is that is when it goes into third circle.

It's when it becomes hogging the spotlight. It's when it becomes over enthusiasm or a need to be liked so that everybody will, you know, will give me validation or whatever and once. Once I recognize that as a part of my personality, I could take it out of the realm of judgment and think about it as a tool, right? And sometimes the the tool is not right for the circumstance and sometimes the tool can be reapplied slightly differently within the circumstances. And again, that's what that's what this is about. This is about making adjustments so that we can.

Bring the best parts of ourselves forward in these high stakes scenarios. Julie, do you want to tell them about one of your communication strengths?

He he.

So we're going to send you this packet, but in even if you never get the packet I I would I would just offer that some some excellent work to do and this might involve pulling your friends too. 'cause sometimes it's hard to see our own strengths. It's easier to to ask the people in our life what they perceive as our communication strengths right down your communication strengths. Just start to brainstorm around that and then think about we can put it as your weaknesses. Think about what happened to you when you get stressed out. How is it that you deal with stress?

In a way that may not be the the choice that you want to make. Knowing these tendencies gives us the power to make shifts. So with that I want to open the floor. I we got 14 minutes left before this thing will automatically shut up. I'm going to put our information up here. We would love follows on Twitter and Instagram. If you have any questions that we don't get to in the next few minutes, please feel free to email us. Hello at vital voice training our websites www.vitalvoicetraining.com.

Um, an were so happy to continue the conversation here and elsewhere, if you prefer to do a, you know, asking question private but hopefully will have some questions here from the group and we can chat more specifics.

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Yep.

Well, thank you so much, Casey and Julie as they said. Feel free to keep using the chat box and ask any questions. This has been so interesting and helpful. I know I'm over here thinking about my posture and my breath and.

So I do have a couple questions just to get us started. Casey, this is kind of specifically for you. How did your education at Illinois Wesleyan prepare you for this specific work, especially during this challenging time that we're in?

Yeah, I mean I so I. I have my BFA in musical Theatre, y'all. I majored in singing and dancing and acting, uhm, what you know we my husband and I had a lot of conversations because we both theater degrees an this idea that a liberal arts education is somehow we useless degree because it's not as concrete. I guess as a stem pursuit or whatever.

An an I of course disagree with that. I think that uhm, what I learned is that the Inter major Illinois Wesleyan gave me a set of superpowers to bring to situations. I think theater people understand project management. We understand deadlines, you know the show must go on. We understand is thinking outside the box so that such a lame phrase like but the creativity that we have an the sort of scrappiness that theater people have has served me very well right now for sure.

Hum, but but also In addition to that, I knew I didn't want to go to a Theatre Conservatory, 'cause I didn't want to just study acting and singing and dancing. I wanted the the full liberal arts education. So what I got from Illinois Wesleyan? From my philosophy classes in my poetry classes in my history classes, and my politics classes made me a more well rounded actor and a more well rounded human being. And just, you know, engaged my curiosity. 'cause that's a superpower of mine as well. Like I want to learn about the world and.

And that, uhm, I think that's really honored at Illinois Wesleyan. Not that intense curiosity, not just intellectual curiosity, but emotional curiosity too.

Yeah, I love that. I love thinking about it in terms of superpowers. That's great.

So for both of you, what experience or relationship had a major impact on you for Casey during your time at Leslie and Ann Julie? Just, you know, in your life and your experiences.

So what experiences are? Relationships have had a major impact on you to do the work that you're doing now.

He

Honey, why I want to get to this question that I just saw the cat box, um in public speaking. Do you believe in 100% preparing ahead of time or leaving some of your presentation for flexibility and improvisation? I lean towards the scent answer, but I would say ultimately it's up to you how you want to prepare and that kind of thing you have no right way to do this. There's no wrong way. There is the way that is most successful for you. So I will say that for most people, a word for word script is not.

Terribly effective 'cause they know how to deal with the word for word script. You end up doing a book report.

Um, instead of outline, is the best way to to go in terms of duration of my freezing, I can't tell, and I'm seeing that things are.

You're OK now.

So so no, but knowing your outline in particularly knowing the transition points of watching how to get from Point B to see all the way to point Z right and knowing your path through the forest, right? As Julie said, very beautifully often, like when we were putting their presentation or putting together ideas, we have all these leaves, right? And we try to tell everybody the leaves, but we tell them that it's a tree. You take your weight, you have to create the trunk with all of your information in or tour guide people through the information that you're giving up. So I hope that answers that question there.

Yeah, that's great.

Well, we don't have any other questions at the moment, so I just want to thank both of you again just for being so generous with your time I think I speak for all of us when I say that were so inspired by your expertise and your enthusiasm for supporting our students and our alumni. Thank you also to those of you who joined us for this class of 2020. Addition of Titan talks webinar series. You will be receiving an email with a survey an like we mentioned will also include that packet, so we would appreciate your feedback on both of those.

Well, this is the final session for class of 2020 addition. There are more tightened talks scheduled in the link that I will send in the chat. Our next Titan talks webinar will take place next Wednesday, May 6th at 12:00 PM. Featuring our president, Georgia Nugent as new members of the Alumni Association. We hope you will sign up for these informative sessions. Please also check out the young alumni council page. I'll go ahead and send that link as well as seniors. You have joined a robust group of Illinois Wesleyan alumni.

That is warmly welcoming you into the Alumni Association. Even though your time as a student has come to an abrupt end, it does not diminish your celebration and becoming alumni. Please watch for an email that will outline more ways to become involved wherever you land. So thank you again, Casey and Julie.

Thanks for having us grape.

Yes, have a great day.

See you later.