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 this episode, please remember to subscribe, give a rating and a review. Now, when you think of CPR, we think of it in terms of health and saving lives. But today,
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The CEO and founder of Speaking CPR is here to share with us how you can use those similar techniques in order to improve your speaking and your communication skills. Michael Davis is a keynote speaker, trainer, and an author. Please help me welcome him to the show. Good morning, Michael. Good morning, Roberta. Great to talk with you.
00:49
Thank you for being here with us today. I'm very excited about our topic because as you know, this is a speaking and communication podcast. Yes. So introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you. Well, my journey to becoming a speaker, author, and trainer about speaking skills started on a desk in first grade when I was humiliated in front of my class. And it had such an impact on me that it was affecting me well into my 30s.
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So much so my boss threatened to fire me for my job because my speaking and communication skills were not good. And underneath it all was this ongoing fear that I would be humiliated again and again and again. That fear of losing my job led me down the path of groups like Toastmasters and the National Speakers Association. And it was there that I learned that everybody's had bad experiences speaking. So we've all been embarrassed. The fear of speaking is actually natural to human beings.
01:44
Some people have even created a theory that it was a survival technique early in our human history. And the other thing is speaking is a learnable skill. Who knew? I thought you were born with it or you weren't. A leader's bono mate. It's secret speaking. Yes, yes. And it took me a long time to get the right kind of help because I'm a bit stubborn. And for the first seven years, after I even was threatened with my job, I thought, well, I'll figure this out. Just give me some books.
02:12
As you had said in our talk earlier, give me a book and I'll learn how to swim. Now, one of my favorite lines is from a hall of fame speaker named Mike Rayburn. He said the problem with being self-taught is that the teacher isn't very good. And how objective are you in evaluating yourself if you're the teacher and the student at the same time? That's a great question. And how can you teach yourself what you don't know? You can read it in a book, but until you've experienced it, it's really hard to teach it.
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Well, I'm getting all these lessons over time. One of the goals I have as a coach and trainer is to compress time so that people don't have to take the years, literally a couple of decades that it took me to figure this out and shorten your learning process by teaching processes and tools that the best speakers and storytellers in the world use.
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So over time I got involved with those organizations and at one time I noticed people started coming to me to ask for help with their speeches and stories. And I thought, that's interesting. Never expected that. And I realized I really love doing this. I've reached the point where I thought I like financial planning, but this communication, speaking and storytelling feels like a calling to me. And that's why I started this company extremely part-time in 2011. It was a couple hours on the weekend. And then.
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Over time, I'd add a few more hours and eventually got to the point where I was spending more time with this than financial planning. And I thought, you know, I'm not being fair to my financial clients. I need to let that go, make the commitment, either do this or don't. And in 2018, I went full time and haven't looked back. I was fortunate during the pandemic in that I had been doing online coaching for two to three years before the lockdown. I spent 2020 teaching people how to look into a camera.
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and not look down here or over there and be comfortable presenting with nobody in front of you. It's a whole different dynamic if you're looking at the screen versus if you were to stand on stage. So that requires its own resources and tools as well. It does. And what we're seeing now as we close to the end of 2022 is a new challenge. Hybrid is not going away. In fact, it will become the norm over time. It's too big of an opportunity for businesses to have global connection.
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They're going to ask speakers to speak to an in-person audience and people on screen. So we need to be able to speak to both. That's right. This is definitely not going anywhere anytime soon. Not at all. Now let's go back to the six-year-old you. Were you asked to speak in front of a class? No, I'll take you back in time. I got in trouble one day for breaking your class rule and my punishment was
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Well, as my teacher said, Michael, since you love getting so much attention, I'm going to let you stand on your desk during nap time so everyone can see you. So there we are a couple hours later, the lights are off in the classroom. You can hear the rain pelting the window. It's kind of chilly in the air. You can actually smell the cupcakes and the chocolate chip cookies for the party. We're going to have later that day, but I'm not thinking about any of that. Roberta, all I can think about.
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is my classmates who are taunting me. You know, they're doing... You know kids, they always find no idea of fun. Oh, they're awful. I have kids, I love my kids, kids can be awful. Anyway, they're doing this and all I can think is please let me get down. I just wanna get down. I won't be bad again ever, I promise. Just let me get down. And this went on for 35 minutes. That's how long you were standing on the desk?
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And when my teacher said, you can get down now. I hope you've learned your lesson. I did. I said, I will never stand in front of people again. That was awful. And so for the next 25 years, I did not stand in front of a group for any reason, unless my job told me to. It was like I was still chained to that desk. He was holding me back. Many regrets. I mean, there were opportunities I had for groups like joining the band in elementary school or drama club in high school, but I always knew it.
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in my subconscious that people would be in the audience and they'd laugh at me. Having the spotlight on you that from that moment changed everything. Yes. And it wasn't until my boss said to me, and I'm quoting him, he called me into his office one morning, he slid a stack of papers across the desk at me and said, look, these are evaluations from your last workshop. You know what? Don't bother reading these. I'll sum it up for him. Your speaking skills are lousy and your stories suck. You are so boring.
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Part of your job is to go out there and get people to come into this firm as new clients and you're not getting that done. These workshops are a waste of time and money. Fix this or we're going to let you go. It was a very supportive kind of luck. With the luck of a better word. Brutal. Hmm. People who are afraid to speak in front of people. It makes me wonder how many of them might have had an experience that made them decide I will never do this again. It's humiliating.
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or some of them just think, I've heard of humiliating stories. I don't want to put myself in that position to begin with. So I'm never trying the speaking thing ever. It's both. And I don't have the numbers, Roberta. I haven't seen them. I've looked for that kind of research. I believe in my experiences, especially training, that most people have had that one experience. And people had far worse experience than me standing on a desk, as far as in front of a group.
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But you bring up a really good second point to that is even if they haven't had it, they've heard enough stories to say, oh, no, I'm not doing that. Here's a theory I heard years ago in a really good book called Confessions of a Public Speaker. The author, Scott Berkens, said, if you think about it, our earliest ancestors, before they ever had tools, weapons, or technology, in order to survive, they had to stay in packs. And the person who got separated,
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typically they were alone without a weapon out in the open and all these eyes looking at them eyes of predators or maybe other tribes they were at huge risk and usually they ended up not surviving we said well what's public speaking you're alone without a weapon out in the open and all these eyes on you right so at a deep level we're getting a message from our own brain that says you're in danger so a big part of the work i do early on in the
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process is working with people on their mindset. I share that story with them and say, look, this is your brain. You can't change that. Those messages are going to be there. You've got to control your reaction to them. For example, if you're speaking in front of a lunch group, you can tell yourself, I don't think they're going to eat me today. They're eating food right now. I think they're good. And audiences, contrary to popular belief, don't want you to fail. No, they actually are rooting for you.
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And if you have those tea and coffee muffin conversations before you start the agenda and they say, hi, I'm Roberta, nice to meet you. Oh yes, I saw your name. You're the one who's speaking to them. You actually see people's excitement at the idea that you're going to speak. They are rooting for you. They want you to succeed. They are looking forward to hearing what you have to say. Yes, and there's a big reason for that. First of all, unless the speaker's an absolute jerk, you don't want them to fail. Secondly,
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I work a lot with TEDx here in Cincinnati. And last year we had a TEDx event, TEDx Women, and I was working with three outstanding women. And they were all really nervous right before the event because they aren't professional speakers. So I sat them down. I said, you've got to understand something. Those 800 people that are going to see you tomorrow, they are in awe of you. And they all looked a little surprised. And I said, it's not because of your speech either. It's because you have the guts to even get up in front of the room. Exactly.
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The speech and the story is just a bonus. They wish they could be you. That is so true. Yeah, it's something that so few people do well that those of us that are in it every day, and I know you're exposed to it on a daily basis, we forget that sometimes. So they want you to do well. And there's another important reason they want you to do well. People are too busy today. They're not gonna get in their cars and they're not gonna drive to an event and hope that you fail. They could go home and watch TikTok and YouTube and watch people fail all day long.
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They want you to provide them with some value because every group we're speaking to has some kind of problem or issue they want solved. That's what they're looking for, solutions to problems. So just know that you are technically part of their tribe because they are rooting for you. They feel like you are one of them. Yes, they are and you are one of them, especially when you share stories of struggles that they can relate to. When it comes to the incident with your boss,
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This is what we usually emphasize as well, that you can have all the technical skill in the world. So you had your financial planning skills, but if there's soft skills, if the communication skills are lacking, it becomes a barrier to your career progression. You're not gonna climb the ladder as much as the person who's willing to speak, who has better communication skills, who can convince executives on why they should go one way and not the other.
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No matter how brilliant you are, but if you cannot speak, if you cannot say those things out loud and present them in a way that resonates with whoever the audience is, it's going to be a deterrent to your career. Oh, it's an excellent insight. And here's the challenge that we're seeing more and more, Roberta, is it's not just the ability to stand up and speak and enunciate and articulate. We are in a society that is overloaded with information. And the worst...
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approach you can take in your presentations is to go up there and give more information. People don't want more information today. What they want and what the best speakers do is they share their experience, their wisdom, and they typically do that through storytelling. You find your experience, your perspective, and give them that new fresh look and it will resonate with audiences. If you give them more information, you might as well just put it on a PDF and send it in an email.
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They're not going to read. So they're not going to read. And that's why I see slides and PowerPoint shows. It's just full of information. It's like, please stop writing everything that you're going to say and just reading. They might as well read themselves. Yeah. That's a good insight. And it doesn't matter anymore which generation you're in. If you're a speaker, know this, that every time you use slides, you have a screen as part of your presentation. You're in competition with your own presentation on the screen.
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You are in competition with the screen every time you present. And the reason for that is you and me and you watching this or listening to this, you were raised on screens, right? My generation, it was TV. My oldest son's generation was computers. My stepson was a cell phone. We are screen junkies, right? What was interesting before the pandemic, we worked with some speakers at the world championship of public speaking with Toastmasters.
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You might remember Sherry Sue in 2018. She was one of the top three. You finished second. We were working with her the night before her speech. And we told her, when you get to the main point in your talk, don't look at the audience, look at the camera in the back of the room. And she said, why? She said, because even though you are in front of them, watch where the people are looking when there are two big screens on either side of you, people in the room are looking at the screens.
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Mmm. The screens are showing them a bigger size version of you. Yes. Here's what's interesting, Roberta. I watched this more than once and I've seen the speakers standing 20 feet away from the audience and people in the front rows are looking at the screens a lot of times. They do that too? They do both. It's almost like being on a virtual
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presentation where you're looking at the camera and sometimes you're looking at the screen. We are so conditioned to screen junkies to look up even when the person is 10 to 20 feet away from us. It just happens. So we have to know where the camera is in the room because when you make your key point, the people are looking at the screen. It's like you're looking right at them. If I'm looking down here at the audience, making my key point, everybody looking at the screen is seeing this part of my face or this part. I'm not looking
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That's not going to have the impact it's supposed to. No, got to know where that camera is at all times. Oh, that was a really good one. No wonder she can't second it. Amongst the messages, it was really good. Yeah. Now, when it comes to storytelling, here's what a lot of people come to me and say, I don't have a story or I don't have anything interesting in my life that could be a story to even talk to people about. Yes, I hear this a lot.
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It took me years to figure this out, Roberta. What they're really saying to you is, Roberta, I don't have anything newsworthy. My story will never appear on the news of overcoming a major health issue, climbing the tallest mountains, swimming the English Channel, winning an Olympic gold. That's what they're really saying. Because we've all been convinced that unless we have a great achievement that's on the news, nobody wants to hear us. And my question to anyone who thinks that is,
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If you have listened to the story or maybe watched a video or documentary of someone who's done something extraordinary, did that person share life insights and tips with you that have changed your perspective? Not as much as either you feel a little inadequate because you think there's no way I can climb Mount Everest, especially after explaining how hard it is and how long it took to prepare, or that's a different VIP club. I'm not.
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part of that. That's an excellent insight. And that's what most people walk away thinking. And they may not use these words, but oh, you're special. I could never do that. It's entertaining. Yeah. Make no doubt. It's an entertaining. And there's always a little bit of suspense. But when we walk away, we forget about it and we go back to our day-to-day lives. Oh, we say it's inspiring. But does it really make us stand up and go do something if it inspired us to take action of some sort?
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No, it doesn't because most of us are worried about, are we gonna be able to pay the bills? My goodness, inflation has taken off. I'm having trouble balancing the bills with work time and oh my gosh, I gotta take care of my kids. My spouse and I are not spending enough time together and my parents need help. That's what most of us are struggling with. And that's why our stories of day-to-day struggles are the ones that resonate most deeply.
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It's the story of balancing your life to make sure that you're giving people attention that want and deserve it and also taking care of yourself, whether it's mental health issues, physical health issues. People want to know how did you overcome that problem? And that's why stories can be a powerful tool. What I'm finding is a lot of stories now, because it's a popular subject. Get out there and tell your stories. People aren't telling their stories very well.
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One of two problems i'm seeing one they don't go very deep They just give some surface ideas and it's a quick narrative or they go way too deep in the details They bog us down so much and they don't take us on this journey of a character Who is facing a relatable challenge or problem who struggles to figure it out on his or her own? And gets to what we call low point where it feels like i'm just never going to overcome this problem and then meets a
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guide, someone who provides wisdom, some new insight, and eventually overcomes that problem with outside help, and at the end has a new perspective on life and then goes out and shares that wisdom with the world. That's the traditional journey of every great movie, book, speech you've ever heard. I'd like to ask you to tell us again the story, I'm sorry to take you back there, of when you were six. There's a part where you talk about the cookies you guys were going to have afterwards.
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If you think about six years, that's all they think about. They don't want to be at school, but they want the fun stuff. The cookies, the juice, whatever it is. The way you describe that, you literally took us back there. The environment rather than just say, oh, when my teacher said I'm naughty, let me stand on a desk, you didn't say that. Right. So can I ask you to do that again? Absolutely. I pulled the curtain back and tell you none of that was accidental. A term we use called vaccinating your speech.
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V A K S. V is visual. A is auditory. K is kinesthetic. S is smell. I realized that the correct word for smell is olfactory, but VACO doesn't work for my metaphor vaccination. This is during COVID. Yeah, I always have to tell people, now look, this isn't that vaccination. This is a good one everybody can agree on. The other part.
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that I don't put in the acronym is taste, but it's in there. So let's go back to the story. What do you remember that you saw when I was sharing the story? I saw the kids making funny faces at you. I saw the dark room. You said the lights went off, right? And I could almost smell the cookies. In fact, I've done this interview, I might go on myself. I try to never tell this right before lunch because people start getting hungry.
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Cookies, right? So you saw the dark room, you saw the kids making fun. What did you hear? The teacher. I picture someone with a low volume, but unhappy voice. You know, when you feel like the kid has let you down, they didn't listen. When she said, Michael, because of what you did, that's what I heard. Okay, did you hear anything else? Did you describe the weather?
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This is okay. This is okay. I'll tell you why it's okay in just a moment. What I did talk about was the rain hitting the windows. The rain, yes. Kinesthetic. Did you feel anything? Not just emotionally, but did you physically feel anything? I felt the tension. Okay. And you standing on a desk. I feel like you have two kinds of kids. You have kids who are going to make funny faces, like you said. But then you're going to have the ones...
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who are embarrassed for you when they just look down in their books and they're thinking, oh my goodness, I'm so thankful I'm not Michael right now. So you feel that energy around the classroom, so to speak. Yes. Oh, I also mentioned that it was chilly in the room. You smelled the cookies. Did you taste anything? I mean, the mentioning of the cookies did make me salivate a little. There you go. All right. Now let's talk about all that. Now here's what I said.
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If you're listening to this, notice how Roberta filled in some of the pieces about the tension in the room. Also because whenever we speak, we're talking to all different types of people. Some are extremely visual. You jumped right on the visual. You actually created some things visually that I hadn't even mentioned. Some people like me are auditory. You didn't quite remember the rain hitting the window, but that's okay. You created your own picture.
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Auditory people will tell me, oh, I heard the rain. I heard the kids snickering at you. Others, when I say it was chilly in the air, they hop all over that and say, oh, I could feel the chill in the room. And because it was raining outside and you mentioned it was dark. I never mentioned it was dark because it was raining. You filled that in and that's fine. I might have forgotten the weather, but it gave me the idea of a dark room. Because like I said, usually when it's raining, it's dark. Oh, that's why I pictured a dark classroom.
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Yes. Here's the other part that I always tell people is we don't want to over explain the scene. Give people just enough and let your audience fill in the rest because, and we've just seen it demonstrated, Roberta, you were in that room with me, weren't you? Yeah. Exactly. So give one or two little details. I said it was the lights are off in the classroom.
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You can hear the rain pelting the window, just chill in the air. You can smell the chocolate chip cookies and the cupcakes for the party later that day, but I'm not thinking about any of that. All I can see are the faces of my classmates. That's it. I laid just enough, and then the audience is going to fill in the rest, and you want them to, because now they're part of your story.
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And then when they become part of your story, something interesting happens. Many times for a few seconds, they will leave your story and go back in time and think about something that happened to them. Similar. Yeah. As one of my friends says so eloquently, your story is about you, but it's for them. They just became emotionally hooked with you and they're not going to be thinking about what's on their cell phone. They're not going to be thinking about what's coming up later today. This guy's bored. No.
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They're right there with you and they want to know what happened. Right. That's what a well-told and well-structured story that ties in what I call vaccination ties into the emotions. There are six common emotions all human beings have happiness, anger, sadness, surprise, disgust, and fear. If you can tap into at least one of those and maybe more, you're going to connect with your audience. Because at the end of the day, the story is what.
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ties to the emotional heartstrings. And that's why they remember it, even though they forget half the speech. They will forget 99% of the words you say. This is the great oxymoron of speaking and storytelling is we work very hard to put the right words in place. Right. They're not gonna remember the words. They're gonna remember the pictures that our words created in their minds and some of the feelings. And if they remember that, they just might remember your main message and actually do something with it.
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So pictures and feelings. Yes. Our words, we have to craft them correctly to create the right pictures and feelings in our audience. And then we've made a difference. If that's not the lesson today, I don't know what is. The brain thinks in pictures. It doesn't think in words. So just giving this entire 45 page thesis on something, when you could be having pictures and graphs and tables and statistics.
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Just give a pictorial depiction of what it is you're talking about versus just explaining in words. I used to teach English in South Korea. Okay. Especially when you teach people who don't speak the language, pictures are your best friend. Oh, yes. There's an old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. I've heard that updated to say a story is worth a thousand pictures. A picture is worth a thousand words. A story is worth a thousand pictures. And that's why storytelling is so important.
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important and it's my biggest concern. Look, I'm in this world, so I'm seeing everybody who says it. I think so many people are saying, get out there and tell your stories. What they're not doing very effectively is telling people how to do it so your stories resonate. In fact, that's why my second book, which I'm in the process of editing right now, the title actually comes from my boss and it's Your Stories Suck.
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He offered me the title of my book. He didn't even know it. But the subtitle is, Your Step-by-Step Shortcut to Long-Term Storytelling Success. You're experiencing the boss. That emotion that you felt when you said that still hasn't left you to this day. No, it's still there. But it's a positive. I look at it as he did me a favor. My first grade teacher did me a favor.
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Because who knows? It didn't feel like it then. It never does at the time. And this is where storytelling becomes powerful is if you can process those emotions and not get emotional about the incident, but still feel those feelings, but not let those emotions rule you. And you can see the positive, that's where the lesson comes in. Every failure that we have can be a lesson for audiences. If we've emotionally processed it, put it in its place and say, here's the benefit
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Start creating a failure file, right? Where have I failed in my life? We've all got those. Then don't get caught up in the, oh, it was a failure. I was, no, no, no, that's not the point of the file. The file is to then go in and create another column that says, what was the lesson learned? How is my life better because of this failure? I feel like it subconsciously heals you too as well. If you've been holding onto the pain of that experience, you can look at it differently.
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if you were to have the failure file and the lesson file. Absolutely. My first seven years, when I was trying to be a self-taught speaker, I had a big problem. I was incredibly insecure, low self-worth and insecure. So I would get up and try to compensate for that by making sure every time I spoke, Roberta, that my speeches were memorized word for word and that my hair, and there was never a hair out of place, my suits were perfectly pressed, my shoes were shined. And as a result of that, people would give me this feedback.
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You are a polished speaker. Oh, thank you. I'm a polished speaker. I wore that like a badge of honor, right? So there I am with my polished speaking skills. And then one day I happened to be dusting my office and I had a can of end dust, right? And I'm spraying the rag and I'm wiping it down. And this thought came into my mind. Nothing sticks to polish. Oh my gosh, the polished speaker, nobody remembers what he says.
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That was a powerful moment for me. Because nobody can relate to a polished speaker. How many of us are polished? Right. You're right. Nobody could relate because I was focused on the exterior. What I wasn't connecting with was the interior. People remembered me. They didn't remember a word I said. And I thought, oh. And that's when I realized with some help that I needed to start sharing part of my struggles. And that was scary in the beginning because when you're an insecure person. It always is. Yeah.
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think, okay, I'm going to relive the humiliation of first grade, or I'm going to have somebody tell me like my boss, you know, that you're lousy. That's scary. But the first time I ever did it, it was in a toast master's meeting. And my friend, Chris, who's a top notch speaker and evaluator, he went to the front of the room, he gave me my evaluation, which was very positive and helpful. And before he walked off away from the lecture and Roberta, he said, I'm not sure what you did today.
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But to keep doing it because I've never felt more real authenticity from you. That was really you. And I had talked about something in my life that was going on very difficult part of my life. And I was scared of that, but I thought I'm going to do it and see what happens. And his feedback is what really pushed me to say, all right, go in there and talk about some more lessons you've learned. He basically was saying to you, let go of the polished speaker image. What resonates with people is your real authentic story.
29:29
Exactly. Most people believe that we want to hear all about success. No, we don't. We want to hear about your human journey. I call it struggle, strife, and setbacks. Now eventually we'd like to hear about the success. We want you to help us solve problems, not make our problems worse, but we need to see that you're an expert in that problem because you've gone through it. And you take us on a journey to how you got to the other side. Yes, all the time. You didn't do it by yourself. Of course.
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Whenever I talk with somebody, I said, well, how did you overcome that problem? Well, it was just me. I said, no, how did you overcome this problem? Because if you had the answers, you would have never had the problem in the first place. Now it may be that in many of our lessons that we learn or what I call the guide is a grandparent, a parent, somebody early in our lives who instilled wisdom in us. And we just kind of tucked it away in our mental file and didn't use it for years, but it was there the whole time.
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It is you meet somebody in the midst of all this chaos and problem and they give you a different perspective. But sometimes like, oh, I remember what my grandpa said and I just had never thought. And grandpa's wisdom comes back, mom's wisdom, whomever. And it helps you get through that problem. They're the person who provides the insights. No matter which way you look at it, you did not do that alone. No, nobody does. If you look at the greatest successes in the world, they had much help. And most of them will tell you that, too.
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That is true. There's a problem here in the United States of the myth of the self-made man or woman. Oh, self-made millionaires, self-made billionaires. We hear it all the time. No such thing does not exist. The most successful people have had help from many individuals that opened doors or helped support them when they were down and didn't know how to move forward. We've all had it. And I wish those would be shared a lot more, just like we don't hear the...
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very messy parts behind the scenes of what happens before they reach success level. I also feel like they also don't share particularly who helped them along which part of the journey until he got to be Jeff Bezos. Yeah. One of the stories I love most and he's been overused now is the story of Steve Jobs. He gets this great idea. He meets with the other Steve Wozniak and the hill of Apple and then he gets forced out of the kingdom so to speak. He's fired.
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Because he's a total jerk. From a company of fountains. Yes. But he started. And then it's a resurrection story. The company is about to fail and they bring him back. But because of so much of the work he'd done with others, especially when he bought Pixar, he learned the power of storytelling because of his association with Pixar. And he realized, oh, now I know how to promote what we're doing. And because of that experience, but it was a massive epic failure and he didn't hide from it.
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Now he may have been a real jerk to a lot of people and he self-proclaimed, but he also learned from his mistakes and was willing to share them publicly. That's one thing I admired about him. Yeah, I love listening to his commencement address at Stanford. Yes. Yes, he talks about all of that. Actually, that's for me is when I saw the humble side of him because like I said, a lot of people talk about, you know, it's very hard to deal with, it's difficult, like you said, but.
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There's some humility in how he presented the comments, especially told his story about the journey through his life and how everything connected together, looking back and how it was all supposed to happen in the way that it did. I love listening to that. Yeah. And if we ever hear a person who has a reputation of being nasty or a jerk to people and we still are drawn to them, that's why, because they're willing to say, look, I've made a lot of mistakes and I've been in
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a total ass with some people or whatever it is, but they say, here's what I've learned from it. And here's what I'm going to share with you, how you can avoid that same situation. That's very true. Tell us about your books, Michael, before you go. Well, I mentioned the one that's being written. It'll be available later this year, early next year. And the first one was called The Book on Storytelling. It's a reference guide, 52 insights about storytelling, but it also gives you links to other, I think, valuable books out there.
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You can't go deep enough into this topic. Of course, I'm biased because that's what I do all day. And I just love the art of storytelling. I think communication and communication errors is the root of all problems. Miscommunication and expectations. If they're not clear, we have all kinds of issues with people. If we could just all sit down and clear up miscommunications and expectations, the world will be a lot less stressed.
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And not just at work. Look how in our personal relationships, that's all falling apart because of that. Yeah, I think personal relationships is even worse because we shortcut communication because we know our spouses, our children, our parents, our friends so well that we shortcut communication. We make lots of expectations and run what they say through our filters. And it just, if we would slow the process down and get clarity on what people are saying, we feel so much better.
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Very true. Words of wisdom from Michael Davis, the CEO and founder of Speaking CPR, trainer and author. Michael, thank you so much for sharing your time with us today. Thank you, Roberta. This is fun. This has been wonderful indeed. And before you go, where can we find you on social media to continue the conversation? You can reach me. I have a pretty strong LinkedIn presence. So you can reach out to me. It's Michael Davis, Speaking CPR.
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or if you have any questions, you can contact me, Mike at speakingcpr.com. Okay, so the email and the LinkedIn profile. I'll put that on the show notes. Thank you very much, Michael. Have a wonderful day. Thanks, Roberta. Bye.