Mid-Month Mini Episode: Confident Communication

[0:00:00 Speaker 2] We’re a resource for learners, including every member of the live strong cancer institutes on track educational pipeline, from middle school to residency. We’re growing collection of interviews, talks and experiences the uncover the myths and the uncertainties of cancer and careers and cancer in order to empower and inspire generations of thinkers and leaders. This is cancer uncovered, uneducated in an empowerment podcast by the live strong cancer institutes.

[0:00:50 Speaker 1] How do we authentically and effectively express what is important to us in our conversations and interactions? This’ll is a very relatable topic as we all navigate the new territory of daily zoom calls, based times, emails, texting, phone calls and all other forms of communication. I’m Ginger Okaroh with the live Strong Cancer Institutes and Emerging Cancer Center at the University of Texas at Austin’s Del Medical School. Thank you for listening to this month’s many episode. Thes episodes are created to provide professional development. Resource is to our listening learners. Today’s episode dives into communicating confidently. Patty Prato discusses what is needed for impactful interactions and how developing a similar communication style can be a form of empathy. Patty has over 15 years of working at the university of Texas at Austin, where she is currently the assistant director of leadership development and coaching.

[0:02:01 Speaker 0] Uh huh, Hi, I’m Patty Prato, and I’m excited to speak with you today about communicating confidently. We’re all coming to this topic with a range of experiences, expectations and, yes mistakes. And it’s certainly a broad subject. Little lots of literature and research around it. Having tools and strategies to help us feel more confident and sure of ourselves is an important foundation for successful conversations, affected presentations and to create engaging and meaningful interactions, whether online or in person, our focus is going to be around two ideas expressing your own values and linguistic mirroring. Thes ideas will help you connect with others and build confidence as communicator. And these are just two of many ways to think about practicing confident communication by directing your energy on what you can control. You build confidence in yourself and your abilities. We can control how we show up, what we say and how we say it. It’s certainly not productive to be spending our time and attention on things out of our control. So when it comes to feeling more confident about our communication style. Let’s just stay with what’s in our control. Before we go any further, I’d like to invite you to pause and reflect on why communicating confidently is important to you. You probably have upcoming meetings, conversations, appointments that will require you to be a strong communicator. Think back to moments in your life when you were proud of your communication style. And, of course, we all have times when we wish we had approached things differently. What were your goals or intended Outcomes in those different situations? Many times, we don’t even set a goal or intention prior to speaking or writing. But by beginning with the ideal result in mind, it can help you visualize a successful conversation or presentation. And if the situation allows, take some time beforehand to reflect. Breathe, visualize yourself communicating confidently. Putting a name on your intention allows us to think deeply about the why behind our what if your intention is to connect with someone? Your tone, body language and words should reflect that intention. Remembering your intention behind your interactions can help keep you focused and engaged, and you can always state your intention to others sharing your goals or expectations can really bring clarity and transparency to the moment, which are two elements of communication. Most people want more of so welcoming a curious and growth oriented mindset around confident communication is essential because becoming a confident communicator takes practice. Creating more awareness around environments or topics that may be extra challenging can guide us to plan and prepare for them. Noticing moments when you’re feeling assured and engaged are Justus important? You can build on those and discover what it was about those interactions or conversations that you did to make it so successful. Here are two more questions to consider as you develop your communication confidence. If I was constantly speaking with someone, what would I be doing? What would I not be doing? Growing in your communication? Confidence is a journey in. One place we can start is with your values. When was the last time you stopped to think about what your core values are? When was the last time you shared them with anyone else? Hear the dull medical school. We are guided by our organizations core values of realize, better caring together. While these words might seem simple, they’re actually quite complex, and there’s a lot of players to their definition. We’re motivated toe live these values, not just say them in name only. Additionally, each student, resident staff and faculty member are invited to think of their fifth value. What is one quality strength or gift that we care about that we practice or that we aspire to, or even encouraged to write this personal value down on a sticker that we can attach to our del MIT i. D card? The goal is to embrace what’s important to us and, more importantly, express it to others, creating a space for conversation, storytelling and connection. Yeah, to communicate confidently, we must remember what’s important to us and be ready to share that part of who we are. If you’re having trouble thinking about your own values or how you might even express them to others in a conversation, try taking the VA character strength survey. It’s a free online assessment from the Via Institute on Character, and you can find it via a character dot Borg. You will receive a report ranking your character strengths in order. One of my top three is gratitude, and that makes a lot of sense for me because part of my confident communication practice includes sending thank you notes and consciously reaching out to acknowledge and appreciate others. So this alignment with your values can make expressing them and living them easier. And it reminds me of the Mahatma Gandhi quote. Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony. So what are some specific behaviors and actions that you can dio to express your own values? How will people know that you value integrity or humor? Live your values as a way to communicate confidently with others? This is who you are, so why not share it? And as we show up authentically on zoom and emails and in person, it will be clear we have confidence in ourselves and what’s important to us. I’d like to pivot now and discuss a different approach to building communication confidence, and that’s a process called linguistic mirroring. By studying someone else’s communication style and then reflecting it back to them, you open the door for connection and influence. New research on mimicking someone’s communication style is proving what we’ve already known about mirroring body language. It creates connection and enhances the effectiveness of your message. Researchers Maxim Stitch of the University of Michigan and Young Kim of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology note that paying attention to how someone processes information as well as how they deliver a message can give you insight on how to communicate with them in a way that lands well and is understood better. A challenge we all face when communicating with others is the uncertainty that perhaps they didn’t really understand us. Or maybe they didn’t get our point. By matching someone else’s communication style, you can feel more confident that your message comes across clear and resonates with them. So how does this work in our daily interactions? Well, linguistic mirroring takes attention and awareness of others communication style. Are they more formal or casual? Do they ask a lot of analytical questions, or are they focused more on an emotional response? Get curious and notice how others speak, write and present, observing their style and tendencies, common words and language that they use. And we have lots of opportunities to bring awareness in this area. We have emails, texts. We hear others speak in meetings. Maybe you have hallway conversations or even private or public chats and zoom. Then, after you’ve made those observations and created that awareness, try it out. Attempt to match someone’s communication style with them when you’re speaking with them or sending them an email, you might need to speed up or slow down. You might need to use some language you don’t normally use. Eso choosing your words carefully and, uh, accepting that it may feel a little weird at first. You want to be careful not to go over words, so it appears artificial or not like you. But you might be surprised to see what a small shift could dio. And when you imagine someone practicing linguistic mirroring on you, it will probably feel like a welcomed conversation. And it will feel easier to connect and understand each other a sui progress in our own awareness around how we show up and how we communicate with others. We will gain confidence and communicating with them. It’s something we can practice every day with just about everyone. Identifying and expressing the values with those around you is one step to establish a sense of self worth and assurance and who we are and what is important to us. It’s always easier to talk about things that we know about. So what better subject to share than insight into yourself? And it’s likely that the person or people you’re engaging with about your values may also feel inspired to share their own with you, creating a space for connection and understanding something we can all strive for more of as communicators.

[0:12:07 Speaker 1] Let’s recall an important point. Petty makes in this month’s many episode, Confident communication takes practice as we embrace what is important to us what we value. We will learn about how to express these values across our interactions. Thank you for joining us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please tell a friend and be sure to subscribe For questions about this episode or the live strong cancer institutes, please email Live strong cancer institutes at del med dot utexas dot e d u. You can also follow our chair and director Dr Gail EC Heart on Twitter AT s s ensue. Gail G A i l ec heart he c k h a r d T thistles Ginger quarrel Thank you for your on going support of cancer uncovered. Here’s wishing you a happy New Year.