Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I am your host Roberta. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into. And by the end of the episode, please remember to subscribe, give a rating and a review. Now since this podcast is focused on communication skills, today I have the privilege of being joined by Eric M. Bailey.
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CEO and president of Bailey's Strategic Innovation Group, who uses psychology to explain why we communicate the way we do with each other. And before I go any further, please help me welcome Eric to the show. Hi, Eric. Hi, Roberta. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for joining us. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Eric. Live in the hot Phoenix, Arizona.
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married 15 years as of this year, three kids. I run a firm called Bailey Innovation Group and my wife and I, we run the firm together. She's the CFO, she does all the numbers and operations and everything. And I just need to go out there and share the word. We study the brain science and psychology of human communication. And when you talk about, if you've ever been frustrated with somebody or been annoyed or anything like that, that's where we fit, right? So I'm trying to understand what is it about.
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that situation that caused us to react that way? What is it about the way that person said that that caused us to react that way? And can we provide some understanding there? And that's what we get to do. We've been doing this work now for about seven years and we absolutely love it. We get to go all over the world and help people improve the relationships in their life, both personally and professionally. That's amazing. First of all, congratulations for being such a wise man, letting the wife control the finances. I mean. Yeah. And then secondly, so you do...
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this work outside of the United States? Yeah, so we've done work in Germany. We're getting ready to go out to Dublin. You know, we do work all over the place. And what we find is that because we've structured the methodology the way we did, it is universal human behavior. So it applies in every arena in all corners of the globe. So we're fortunate enough that we get to do that work. As we said, both professionally and personally, first of all, let's talk about the personal stuff. What is it about our personal relationships?
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that, like you said, when you're frustrated, when you're angry, there's this thing of the people closest to us, the most are the ones who get the brunt of our frustrations the most. What is that about? Yeah, there's actually a couple of really, really easy reasons that happen. So one, we are most comfortable being ourselves around the people that we love the most, that we spend the most time with. And so if we're at work, or we're at the store, or we're in other places, we're more comfortable
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We have to put up a little bit of show for getting frustrated. We kind of will temper that a little bit. And if we're annoyed with our boss, like we can't just jump out and say what we need to say sometimes. And so we kind of hold all that in. And then when we get to the people that we're most comfortable with, we're just able to be ourselves. And so all of that frustration can come out. All the words that we're thinking can come out or maybe things we're not thinking, right? The comfort level makes it easier. So one thing that I always try to remind people is who's going to get your best self.
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Right? If you're giving, you're putting up all this energy to maintain relationships at work, or you're putting forth all this energy to show respect, even if you're not feeling it in certain situations. You have it within yourselves to do that at home. But what would it look like if you were in the middle of a fight with your spouse, and you showed them respect, even if you didn't feel respect in that moment? What if you decided to temper the peak level of emotion?
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and bring it back and say, okay, let me calm down a little bit. I notice myself, right? And so there's things that you can do. Another reason that happens is because the people that you know best know you the best and they're more likely to poke you in the areas that are most sensitive to you if they want to, right? And so you see these things happen. And so a lot of times when people react defensively there's things that we say, you overreact for me and my spouse. My number one thing is, is you know, I think that she overreacts. My wife has very strong emotion.
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And so when she feels something, she feels it big. And usually when we're in an argument, it shows up for me that she's overreacting. And so then I like, why are you overreacting? Which makes her feel that I'm reducing her emotions. Like I'm not respecting what she's going through, which is like, doesn't feel good to her. And so when you understand these things, all of a sudden it's like, okay, she's not overreacting. She is reacting, right? She is reacting as she reacts.
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Right. I'm not diminishing her emotions. I'm not doing this. I'm just reacting as the way I react. And when we allow each other to be ourselves in those conversations, okay, I don't need to get super defensive because she's overreacting. I don't need to do this because of that. And now we can get back to the point, which is resolving and coming back together. Because that's the moment you realize you're not fighting each other. You're fighting the issue. Exactly. Exactly.
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So when you feel like she's overreacting, are you temporarily thinking she's fighting you? Oh yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that she's shared with me that she feels is that she thinks that I have done something with the intent to cause her emotional harm. If I do this or that, she thinks that, oh, he must have done that to give me harm. And she reacts strongly. And so then I think she's overreacting, right? Which then again, she's like, oh, you must be saying this, right? So we have this cycle that happens.
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And when I see her overreacting, my thought is, oh, she's overreacting to get me to feel something, right? And we're assigning all of this extra stuff into the discussion that isn't really part of the discussion, but very quickly becomes the entire emotional base of the discussion or the argument at that point. And so one of the things that we're working on doing is reminding ourselves in the middle of the discussion that we love each other. Which we will hold hands, both hands.
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look each other in the eyes and say, I love you. And she's like, I love you too. What it does, you know, gives a little bit of oxytocin release, which is a brain chemical that helps us form bonds. And it lowers our anxiety a little bit, our emotions a little bit, and we're able to reconnect and say, okay, we're trying to do the same thing here. We're trying to reconnect. We're trying to communicate what we're feeling. And from that point, it's a lot easier. That's why you've been married for 15 years happily. So.
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And I want to stress the happily part because usually we think people who last long in marriages never have arguments. No, it's great. When you get to the point where you're arguing about how your arguments happen, that's a level to go. We are so committed to our ability to work in relation with each other. In our relationship, we're committed to that relationship that we're going to hold ourselves to a high standard of how we're going to engage. That's really important.
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And yes, we're very happy. We're best friends. We love each other. We're best friends. We like each other. Oh, that's important. Yes, that part, the liking each other. Yeah, absolutely. When you hold hands and you say, I love you, and that's the moment you get calm. I don't know if you're familiar with the whole oponopono, the Hawaiian system. Yeah. Yes, the, I love your phrase. Yes. That's where my mind went when you said that. It's a healing mechanism that they use in Hawaii. Yes, it's ancient times.
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It's very powerful. And you know, at work, you're not going to, you know, hold someone's hands and say, I love you. But there's other things that you can do, right? So if you're in an argument with somebody, if you're in a relationship, you can do it. You know, touch them on the shoulder, touch their chair, touch the table, move your hands in some way that show that you are committed to the conversation. And look them in the eyes, right? Looking people in the eyes, again, releases that oxytocin. One of the things really powerful is when someone's talking and you're in an argument, listen to what they say.
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while looking them in the eyes. And then when they're done, say, I hear you, thank you, I understand. And then repeat back what you think you understood because that feeling of being understood and being seen is so rare, it's gonna knock them off base. They're not going to want to fight anymore. Their defenses will come down and you can get back into dialogue, right? There's so much in just listening to somebody. If everyone just listened as people are talking, it would change the whole world.
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I'm sure it was because we jump into self-defense mode. I'm proving to you that what you're accusing me of, I didn't do, or it wasn't my intention. We love the word intention. And that's why it never ends. I've got a colleague that I just met this year. She talks about the really important distinction between intent and impact. So I didn't intend to hurt you, but the impact was you are hurt. And the impact is really all that matters.
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Right? And we keep saying, oh, you're just too sensitive. I didn't mean to offend you. It's like, no, no, no, no. I said something and it offended you. I can apologize for you being offended. I can apologize for that offense. It doesn't mean I'm a horrible person. It means that because of the thing I said or did, it caused you that pain. I didn't intend to do it, but it still happened anyway. And I can apologize for that. And again, that's another way to rebuild these relationships everywhere. Acknowledge the impact you made for Get Your Intention.
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When it comes to the workplace and you work in teams and there's conflict, because we fight with our siblings that we love the most. And we work in teams. Before we get to the leadership part, let's talk about just being a fellow team member, horizontal structure. You're in a project team. There's five of you. You do different things. Somebody doesn't pull their side of the part of the wagon. Somebody is late with something and it affects everybody else. And they walk into the boardroom late and you're frustrated.
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What are some of the things that you can do to be decent? A couple things show up. So one, pay attention to what you truly want. A lot of times in the work environment in a horizontal kind of space, I want to be seen as valuable as I see myself. I want to be seen as valuable. If I'm on a team and we're not producing enough or I'm doing more than you're doing, I wanna be seen as more valuable than you because I obviously produced more.
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And so you see people do little passive aggressive things, right? To establish how valuable they are. They'll say, Oh yeah. They'll ask them, Hey, tell me what you did on, you know, page five, knowing that that person didn't do page five, didn't read page five just to get them to say, Ooh, I'm sorry. I don't actually, I know. Let me explain it. Right. That's something that people will do to show that they are valuable.
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One of the things that people don't do is they want to be valuable or seen as valuable. And so during the process, they'll get super upset or angry. I'm doing more work than you were doing. Well, if you care more about the end result and you end up doing more work because you're better at this space or this time management or your environment allows you to provide more, great, the project will get done.
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And if you care about the project getting done, then how it gets done really shouldn't matter. And that's something that people have a hard time letting go of, of this idea that we all have to work equally. No, you don't. A few years ago, I was the director of organizational development for a healthcare organization and next door to me was the manager of HR. And she was responsible for doing all this work with spreadsheets and loading data into a database.
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And that's not her area of expertise. That's not her strong suit, but she worked for three days struggling through this process and I go into her office and I'm like, are you still working on that spreadsheet? She's like, yeah, it's not quite working out. I don't understand it. It's so time consuming. And I'm like, why don't you just give that to me because I'm really good at spreadsheets and I have the entire thing done in an hour where it would have taken her another week. Right? So does it mean that.
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I'm working harder, providing more than she is. No, we found an avenue that I tend to be more efficient. So it freed her up to do more of her other work. That's how we can partner together, not by spending an equal amount of time in the project. No, let me do the things I do fast. Let you do the things that you do fast. And then we can work together and produce the results we're hoping to produce. Did you take credit for the spreadsheet? No, the interesting thing is because we were able to partner through this,
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she was so grateful that I did it, that she gave me credit wherever she had the opportunity to. Right, so it wasn't that I ever asked for it. Yeah. I was thinking about the team doing well. I was actually thinking about my friend doing well. And so I did whatever I could. And because of that, because of that relationship we built, she looked for opportunities to give me the credit.
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And that's how it works, right? And then it felt better getting credit that way feels so much better than asking for it. Oh, so what is the psychology behind us wanting that and saying, oh, I wanna show the boss that I did this part and Eric didn't know what page five was even about and he didn't contribute to page seven. I need to show them that I'm better than him. So what's the psychology, what's the brain science behind that? Without getting too deep.
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It's the drive for significance, right? So we want to be significant and we're always running away from insignificance. For example, if you think about an employee who doesn't get respect, never really thought of as a contributing member of a team, does meaningless work, right? This person is dealing with a lot of insignificance and you see people respond to their own insignificance at a couple of different ways. One, you'll see people get apathetic, completely, I don't care. They'll disengage.
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You'll see people over-assert themselves through being a know-it-all or cutting people down, over-explaining things, or just talking for the sake of talking. All these things help people feel in the moment that they are significant. If you hear people over and over and over explain the same thing, it's not because they feel that that needs to happen. It's because oftentimes they're usually cut off when they talk. They've probably grown up getting cut off when they talk.
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And so they want to keep talking because if they have the floor, they want to keep talking because that makes them feel heard. For the first time, probably. First time. When you see people getting petty and trying to take credit or put people down, it's the same thing. I want to feel significant. I had an important role in this work. And if you think this work is important, I need you to know that it was me. I need you to know it was not them, right? Or I did more than them. It's all a fight for significance. Wow. That's what it boils down to.
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Absolutely. And then when you're a leader, one thing we've accused leaders of is this thing of presenting yourself as, I have all the answers, I don't make mistakes, and therefore that's the reason my subordinates are gonna respect me. What do you think of that myth? One of the biggest myths of leadership is the leader knows everything.
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It's not true. Leaders don't know everything. Leaders should not be expected to know everything. Leaders should not hold themselves to a standard of knowing everything. And the reason that is so powerful is that if you pretend that you know everything or you hold yourself to a standard where you do know everything, that means if someone asks you a question that you actually don't know, you're gonna make something up. And that happens so often, right? People make such big mistakes because they wanna project that they know everything. You see people, if they make a mistake,
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They don't apologize for the mistake. They just double down and try to prove why their mistake was actually not a mistake. These are terrible leadership traits and they all come from this idea that the leader knows everything. They don't. People are afraid that if they acknowledge they don't know they're gonna be seen as incompetent, right? That's not how it works. I mean...
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If every time someone asks you a question, then you say, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. You might be doing it confident. But more often than not, if there's 10% of the questions that come to you over the course of a year, if you don't know 10% of those, that doesn't make you uncomfortable. One of the things that we teach in our work is that learning is more important than knowing. Because learning means that your brain is continuing to learn new things, acquire new information.
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build new skills. And if you're consistently learning, you have to first acknowledge that there's something you don't know, right? You can only learn things you don't know. Exactly. And so we should be actively seeking out those things that we don't know so that we can keep learning. Learning in the sense that you acknowledge that you don't know everything, and also that you are open minded, and you are open to new ideas. Some of the interviews I've had in the podcast in the past where
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where the HR people are talking about the general differences now in communication. The leaders are much older, they're still stuck in their old ways and their old ways of doing things and old ways of communicating. And then you've got the millennials coming in as fresh grads. What are some of the things you can advise them on in order to bridge that gap? One of the things that's really important is you look at the kind of broad range of people in the workplace. So, we've got our boomers, we've got our...
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Our Gen X in there, we've got our millennials, we've got our Gen Z coming in. What I feel is most important for us to realize is that there is no blanket definition on the personality of someone based on their generation. We like to think and say often that millennials are lazy and entitable, and that's not true, right? 80 million millennials can't all have the same personality traits. And if you look back at past issues of Time Magazine,
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You see that every new names generation is lazy and everyone calls everyone else coming up lazy. And as we start to look at that, it's like, oh, what we're really doing is we're just creating an in-group and an out-group and us and them. And when we have a very clear them, almost all the descriptor words are negative. That's what we're doing. And that serves who? It serves the people that are making that classification. Right, so.
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If you have the reason Apple has been so successful over the last, you know, 20 years is because they're very clear about who their enemy is. Their enemy is Google. They're united around a common enemy. And psychologically that does a lot to bond a team together. Right. So whether it's another company or an idea, when you come together around a common enemy, it forms a tighter bond. And then with that bond, you're able to do more work. And so when you think about this idea of.
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Millennials are X, Y, or Z, which is all negative. Everyone who's not a millennial is like, hey, look, we're all on the same team. I think the same thing. And when you recognize that you're on the same team as somebody that you feel validated, you feel- The significance. Right? It keeps coming back. And so what we wanna do is we wanna show people that the ways in which we divide ourselves, you know-
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red states and blue states and millennials and boomers and all these different categorizations. And we'd love as humans, we love to categorize. What it does is it creates boundaries and it creates differences. What we can realize is that there are many different ways that we are of the same team. Millennial Gen X, right? Those are two clearly different groups of people, but you can find a way. There are always commonality. Is it this brain shortcut thing of us being lazy, just grouping people into one stereotype?
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Absolutely. Absolutely. Even when you think of like looking at clouds and you see shapes in the clouds, right? Part of our brain is designed to recognize patterns. It's a bias that psychologists call apophenia bias. And that bias, our brains love to create patterns and data. And we like to create order out of chaos. And so because of that, we look at people and say, oh, you're this group, you're that group. And so you mentioned you're from South Africa, right? You're living here in the United States.
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you would be African American. Yes. And me born and raised in Washington and live in Arizona. My grandmother's from Japan. And so I'm Japanese American, right? And so people would just on first glance look at this and they'd say, oh, those two they're of the same group because they're both brown skin and black hair. People want to categorize, but we can say, oh, we could be.
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in a group together, we could be in different groups together. We can be. And so when you start to realize that we're actually in control of how we see how connected we want to be with other people. And that's the power we can choose instead of saying, Oh, we're so different. We can say, Oh, there are many ways in which we're the same. We both love to talk about communication. We both are interested in brain science. We both love leadership, right? We belong together. We love to have conversations together.
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Once you're born on different continents, we could say, oh, actually look at all these different ways that we can connect on a human level. So it looks to me like the non-tangible stuff is what connects us. The physical tangible stuff is what we use to divide each other. Usually, but if you think about it also, the physical stuff we can use to form those groups as well. If you look in groups that you belong to, it feels good to be in a group.
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Right. Where an opportunity is looking at people that don't belong to that group, or groups that you typically associate yourself with, and find what are other ways I can bring people in to me. Go into their space and be with them. And that's how we really start to kind of change the culture of the space, is we start to engage each other as humans, engage each other as unique individuals with the infinite variability of humanity. We start to engage each other and be seen.
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Isn't it more abundant thinking when we see what we have in common and embrace that rather than what divides us? Absolutely. Absolutely. When we start to realize that we can connect with each other and engage with each other, what it does, it opens us up to see that there are more people we can connect with and engage with. And that process just continues to open up. And that would change the world if we all really understood that. This abundance thinking is that there is more that connects us than divides us.
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But honestly, why then do we keep going into areas and focus on the things that divide us? Because it makes us feel more significant. If we can say there's something wrong with you, there's something wrong with your group, there's something wrong with your type, it makes me feel like I'm elevated, right? It makes me feel more significant. But we don't realize, because that's scarcity thinking, right? The scarcity mindset that there's not enough of goodness. I need to gather all I can. We realize when we start lifting each other up, everyone.
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gets lifted up. We feel better by lifting somebody else up. When we all start doing that, people start lifting us up. Abundance thinking. Exactly. So I'm Zulu by heritage. And in ancient Zulu culture, if you're a stranger and you're walking from New York to California, you would walk the first day when the sun sets, you look over whatever nearest house is there, you walk in, you introduce yourself, you say all your clan names, where you come from, your people, they welcome you in, give you dinner, and one bed to sleep.
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They wake you up in the morning, give you lunch for the next part of the journey. You do that for months until you get to... Even though none of these people have ever heard of you, in my language, we don't have the vocabulary for the word stranger. Have you heard of the word Ubuntu? Yes. That's from my language. It's a Zulu word meaning humanity. I am because you are. Yes. If I hurt you, I'm hurting myself. If I do something kind to you, I'm doing it to myself. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's powerful.
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Imagine what the world would look like if everyone understood that. Everyone lived by that. I was recently in a Southeast Asian country and I just noticed gratitude. The cultural fabric was gratitude and driving down the street, we were in a taxi and driving down the street and there's tons of cars and scooters and motorcycles and bicycles, like just moving down the street. And I noticed that there was a car coming from the opposite direction that wanted to.
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you know, come into our flow of traffic. And then all of a sudden, no traffic lights, no anything. The traffic just kind of slowed down and let them, and I was like, coming from the States that is so foreign. Like this is my space. If you put on your blinkers, say, I want to get up. It's a difference between entitlement and gratitude, right? So entitlement is this belongs to me. I deserve this versus I'm grateful that I have this. And if I'm grateful that I have this, I want to share it with people.
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Right? Instead of, I want to hold it for myself. And that gratitude, that fabric of gratitude, it was so profound. You feel it. It was tangible. And I think that if we understood a way to engage with each other such that we're grateful for the conversation, even if we disagree, grateful for that person's time, even if they have the wrong opinion, we're seeking to understand them before we expect them to try to understand us. That fundamentally changes.
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how we show up, how we experience the world. That's what we're up to. I wanna touch a little bit on the diversity, equity and inclusion work that you do. Why a company is still holding on to the opposite way and why should they need to be convinced? Yeah, that's a really interesting question because there's a lot of layers to it, right? So in the capitalistic society, it's not necessarily everyone trying to get the most market share, although that does tend to be an indicator of success. But we see people want stability.
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People want growth. People want continued success. And in that case, for example, let's say that I've been running my business for 25 years and I've been growing consistently, you know, 5% a year for 25 years. Over those 25 years, I started to develop a pretty clear idea of my ideal customer. A pretty clear idea of what it takes to be successful. A pretty clear idea of
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what I should expect in the future. Cause over 25 years, I see the ups and the downs. And so I start to be very clear about that. Now what my brain will do is it starts to develop a couple of biases. One is called status quo bias. Status quo bias is this idea that we like to keep things the same because if we keep them the same, then they're more predictable, right? So everything that I've seen in the past, experienced in the past, my brain wants to expect those things to keep happening again in the future.
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and reliably so. And that's kind of where my brain will head. Right. Another one is the bias of what I see, what I experience is the way the world actually is. One of the things we call the illusion of certainty. So the illusion of certainty is our brain consistently trying to project into the world that we are certain that what we believe isn't just our belief, it's what we know. It's the way the world actually is. There are infinite number of ways to engage in the world. So there's no one right way.
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So as a business owner for 25 years, I'm going to expect the world to keep showing up the way that it's showed up for me for the last 25 years. I can expect that my customers are going to continue to be my customers. And if you're telling me that I've been doing it wrong for 25 years, I am mad at you, right? I get upset at you. And so when you talk about why do people need to be convinced? Well, they need to be convinced because we're actually showing them something completely different.
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of the concepts that we think about, you know, everyone looks at the world through their own lens. People have bifocals, some people trifocals, right? We're a side of far said, right? We all have different lenses. We're looking through the world through our own lenses. The thing is, let's say you wear glasses, right? So when you're looking through your glasses, you don't see the lenses. You're not looking at the lenses. And so all that we're trying to do in the diversity, equity, inclusion space, not all we're trying to do, but what our firm is really trying to help people with is we're just pointing out the lens. Like just so you know, you are wearing lenses.
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Just know that you're wearing a lens. Oh, I never realized that before. Right. There's a really interesting experiment where they had a certain glasses that would actually flip the image. So you put it on, everything you see is upside down. So up is down and down is up, but people are upside down and it's really disorient. But after a relatively short period of time, your brain that says, okay, let's, and it flips it back. And your brain stops seeing the upside down image, even though your lenses are still the same.
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But because your brain is so used to adjusting, right? You don't even see the lenses anymore. They still exist, but to your brain, they don't exist anymore because you're not looking at the lenses. And so when you start to think about this, the reason this work is so important is that as a collective humanity, it's important for us to recognize that we're all looking through things in our own way. And you're looking through things in your way, I'm looking through it in my way. And for me to understand you better as a human.
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I should take the time to try to understand your lenses. So everything that I hear from you, if I understand your lens, oh, it's because it's running through this filter that you have. And that is something that is so powerful because it allows me to connect with you on a human level. You try to understand my lenses when you hear me react in a certain way. Oh, it's probably because Eric is seeing it through this way. And it's not that he's attacking me, not that he's a crazy or he's an idiot or whatever. It's just, that's the way that he sees it.
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Interesting. Different lenses. Like I said, I've only been here for two years and my country has its own political stuff going on. But when I saw your videos on YouTube, I said, of all the subjecting or tackle why politics? Why are we fighting so much? Is social media at fault for the way we are or we've always been this way is just exposing us. What is going on with all these political fights and divisions? Again, a very powerful question.
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First off, the reason that I pick these topics that I talk about is because a lot of people, when they get exposed to these topics, they have a really strong emotional reaction to one way or the other. I think that these things are binary, right? It's yes, no, good, bad, you know, happy, sad, good, evil, right? We assign these strong emotions because of that binary. Well, it's not binary. These things are not binary. There's a lot of nuance in there that typically isn't discussed.
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And so what I want to do is I want to provide a new way of thinking about these things such that we don't have strong emotional reactions to them, but we can kind of slow that down and have a more logical discussion. So we can stay in dialogue with each other. And I think wherever strong emotions happen in conversations, that's what I want to dive into. I love talking with all different kinds of people and all different sides of arguments. And when we do that reliably, right, because we're able to engage. There's a video that I have on YouTube called a new conversation on white privilege.
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I think the video is whatever the video is. I like the video. But the most important lesson you could ever get in difficult conversations is reading through the comments. Right, I get a comment or two every week of someone who's just super emotionally charged about it. And if you look, I've responded, I think, to just about every single person. We have these powerful, rapid dialogues about them. And many situations they say, you know,
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I'm so surprised. I never expected you to respond. Wow. You're not attacking me for my opinions. Thank you so much for the dialogue. I never saw it from that point of view. And we have these really powerful discussions, not because I'm trying to tell them they're wrong. I want to listen and I want to hear, I want to understand, and I want to respond. And I want to be clear. Like they say this, like actually totally hear that. I'm actually talking about this over here. Oh, I never saw it. All right. And so we have this really cool conversations.
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The reason it's so important right now is because we're getting yanked apart. The political divisions are wider than they ever have been before. Religion and all these kinds of big social issues, emotional issues that are really pulling people apart. You ask it, is social media responsible? It didn't help, right? Social media, what it does, it gives an opportunity to say what we need to say by typing it.
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have a dialogue and not have a face to face. I can say whatever I wanna say. And it kind of accelerated that. And also we have these specific groups that now I can connect with someone from the other side of the country who believes exactly what I believe. And we can just share ideas back and forth. Right, we call this the echo chamber. Echo chamber, you say something and it bounces back to you hear back the thing that you just said and it validates your opinion. You feel your significance again. Exactly. My mom is very religious. So you cannot debate her on that because she really is certain.
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about what she believes. When it comes to political beliefs, if I'm on the opposite side and you are on the other end, is there even a point of engaging with you? There's no way I'm gonna convince you to come to my side of the argument. Is that even possible? Yeah, absolutely. First and foremost, the premise of convincing each other is the biggest problem in all of this. We have an idea that what I see is right.
33:25
what you see is wrong and I need to prove to you why you're wrong. That's never gonna work. It's never going to work. We are not going to change policy by debating about it on Facebook. And so why do we keep doing it? Well, we keep doing it because we wanna win. Like I wanna prove how smart I am, how dumb you are. I wanna prove how right I am, how wrong you are. And when I do that, I feel more significant. And so-
33:52
The premise of winning and losing is the first problem. We need to get rid of that idea. If I'm gonna talk with someone that disagrees about some issue, political issue or religious issue, if we disagree about something, I'm not going to try to convince you because I'm not going to convince you. Where I have opportunity is trying to understand you. I wanna understand what's a layer or two deeper than the issue, like what drives you, what motivates you? What is your lens? What helps you see things the way you do?
34:22
Because if I can see you as a human that's engaging in the world, right, just like I am, I might be able to connect with you. I might be able to understand you. I might be able to stay in dialogue with you. I've got a family member, a family member of my spouse and by a couple of different marriages, right? We're philosophically on opposite ends of the spectrum. We're diametrically opposed. And I made the choice, right? When she keeps posting things on Facebook, and I just kept engaging with her. So instead of saying, you know, forget it.
34:50
I don't want to talk to you. I don't want to acknowledge you. I decided to stay in dialogue with her. And, you know, it's been three years or so since we've kind of been talking about these sorts of things, maybe four years, two weeks ago, she sent me a note and said, Hey, Eric, I just watched this documentary and I've got some questions about the way that I've seen things I'd love to talk with you about it. First of all, this is not a documentary that she ever would have watched before. I don't, I don't think. Before engaging with you in conversation. Right. So because that we've got this space of.
35:20
curiosity. And so now she's engaging with me about something new. And she wants to get my opinion about it because she's curious. And she wants to have a discussion with me and all of that is really powerful because what it does is it connects us as humans. Right? All the conversations of her, you are not trying to convince her or convert her to your side. Right. There have been situations where she says something that I think is inaccurate, and I'll correct that. And she'll say, Oh, sorry about that. Because I don't make her feel dumb for getting it wrong.
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I think because you are family, like you said, by marriage, anyone listening would think, oh, she might be open to Eric's suggestions because he's family. If somebody grew up in the hood, I just don't see them sitting across someone from the KKK and trying to have a dialogue like In Which Universe. No, but it's real. It's happened. There's a gentleman and you actually watch it on, he has a Ted talk. It's an older black male. I think now he's probably in his sixties or so, but he's actually.
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sat down, old black guy, sits down with KKK members, has a drink with them, has dinner with them, has conversations, has dialogue with them, and he's actually converted, not intending to convert them, but he's converted several people out of the KKK just because he's had conversations with them. Now, again, his point was not to convert them, but his point was to engage them.
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on a human level. Like you are not the summation of all the titles you carry. You are a human. And when we feel understood as humans, we connect. Yeah, it's possible. The most outrageous thing is possible because we're all humans trying to make our way in the world. Eric, please give us just one last word of wisdom. Yeah, absolutely. The one thing that I would love the world to know is this concept that I have called radical curiosity. A radical curiosity is this idea
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we are going to try to understand the person across from us before we expect them to understand us. And that's a fundamental shift in the way that we engage with the world. Because a lot of times people are like, oh yeah, I'm willing to understand you, but you need to understand me first. And if we approach this through radical curiosity, expecting that I have something to learn from you, I will show up differently. If you've ever been fully and completely understood,
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fully seen, like it feels so good. It's very rare, right? But wouldn't we want to give that to other people? Like as much as possible. Imagine if everyone listening to this podcast went out today and tried to really see and understand somebody. That would be a lot of people feeling seen and understood, feeling significant.
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that they may do return the favor and they may get curious about you. And it's really powerful. So that's it. If you approach the world, approach your life with this idea of radical curiosity, you can change the world. Radical curiosity. Seek to understand first before you are understood. Before expecting to be understood. Words of wisdom from Eric M Bailey, the CEO and president of Bailey's strategic innovation group. Thank you so much for being here today. And before you go, if we want to continue this conversation, where can you find you?
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Yeah, you find me on social media. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on Instagram. I'm on Facebook. I'm on Twitter. I don't use Twitter that much. So feel free to reach out. You find me just search for Eric M Bailey. All right. I'm going to write all your links to your social medias on the show notes. Thank you. Thank you so much, Eric M Bailey. Don't forget to subscribe, give a rating and a review. Thank you for being here today. This has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you for having me.