Hey, what's up and welcome back to another episode of the Straight Shooter Recruiter Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Emily Durham. I've been a recruiter for over seven years. I've been featured in Forbes, BBC. You know me from TikTok, you know me from Instagram, you know me from your dreams. Just kidding. Well, maybe I'm not going to judge you, and you know what, that's fine. I actually love that for us. But you know what I am known for. It's knowing the hell out
of careers. It's helping you thrive in your nine to five and beyond. That's our whole mo here. But today I do have some tough love. Today is not going to be an episode to listen to if you're having a bad day, because I'm going to give it to you straight. Okay, bestie, I don't know how to tell you this, but your communication style
is ruining your life. Yeah, you heard it here first I'm talking about it's ruining your dating life, it's ruining your friendships, and most significantly and most in my wheelhouse, it is going to be ruining your professional career. So sit back, grab a coffee or something stronger, because this is going to be one of those episodes, and let's get into it. When I say that your communication style is holding back your life in all aspects, I'm
not really talking about the kind of communication that you traditionally think of. I'm not talking about how to deliver a great presentation or how to be a great public speaker. I do have content on that as well, though, if you are interested in going deeper there. I'm more so talking about how we communicate day to day, face to face with an individual, in email, in texting. It's really about the everyday communication that builds up all of our
relationships personally and professionally. And when people don't feel confident in their communication skills, there's three main areas that we see the most pain. Number one is you avoid conflict because you're not able to communicate your needs or you're not able to handle feedback. You are also very scared of rejection, so you're not able to speak up and ask for the things that you want because you live in a constant state of fear, and you are also very scared of ruffling
feathers. You don't want to say something or speak up or advocate for yourself because you are scared of upsetting other people. All through these fears are fundamentally holding you back in your life and in your career, and they're actually going to be making it more difficult for you to get to where you want to go and the broader scope of your life. So we're going to dive into
all three of those topics. We're going to give you tangible skills and takeaways on how you can be a more clear and thoughtful and more impactful communicator in your day to day and most especially on your dates. Because I want all of you to find a boo, myself included. I want to start off with fear number one, which is, to be honest, the fear that I have held the most in my career, which is the fear of conflict.
But I read a quote probably about two weeks ago that really helped me reframe how I think of conflict, and it was that no form of intimacy exists without conflict. There is no such thing as being able to have a close relationship with someone, whether it's at work or in your personal life, if you veer away from conflict, and conflict is very much seen as a taboo it's seen as a bad thing. It's seen as a bad word.
But conflict isn't bad. Conflict is actually something that's really healthy and really productive. What is not healthy and not productive is when we shy away from conflict so much that we become avoidant or we become a people pleaser, both of which are not okay either way. Perfect example for you. Let's say you went out for dinner with one of your good friends. You ordered chicken fingers because they were in the washroom, and the waiter came by and said you
needed to order your food right now. Your friend comes back from the washroom and says, I didn't want chicken fingers. I wanted a hamburger. Are you going to break down and cry? Are you going to say, oh my god, I'm the worst friend ever? Oh my god? Are you going to get mad at this person for saying they wanted a burger more than they wanted chicken fingers. Obviously not. They're just expressing their needs to you and letting you know that that wasn't the route they wanted you to take.
It's not a big deal. You apologize, you take accountability. Maybe you pay for their chicken fingers or offered to go get them a burger after,
and you move on. However, if your friend came back from the washroom and saw the chicken fingers on the table and made the conscious decision not to say anything, and they sat with that resentment, and then that resentment built on top of their resentment from two weeks ago and resentment from four weeks ago, and suddenly they blow up at you and your friendship has a total falling out over some effing chicken fingers. Wouldn't you be frustrated? Everyone would be.
Avoiding conflicts only gives us an opportunity to have resentment build up and have fear and anxiety build up that ultimately makes things so much more difficult for us to navigate, and mountains become mole hills. No, that's incorrect, mole hills become mountains. I was so close to saying a really good sentence back
there. But this in goes for work. If you are scared to have a difficult conversation with one of your stakeholders, a difficult conversation with your coworker or your boss, where you're expressing your needs or you're expressing something that is not working out for you, if you avoid those, I promise that resentment and that anxiety is just going to build and build and build until you hit a point where you quit a job that you should not have quit because this
economy is bad straight up. Or you have a meltdown at work, or you say a snappy kind of bitchy thing to your colleague and suddenly you have tarnished your personal brand and your reputation for no reason. It is so much more healthy to get comfortable having these in the moment, in the actual situation conversations where you advocate for yourself, and that all boils down to not letting yourself be scared of conflict and to stop seeing conflict as a bad thing.
The other reason that your communication is falling apart is because you are petrified of rejection. You're scared to ask that person on a date, and you're also scared to ask for that raise because you are terrified of being told no. Let's just take a second to think about that. If the worst case scenario is that nothing changes, so you ask for that person's number, they say no, Your life goes on. You ask for that raise, they say no, your life goes on. Then what's really changing. What are you
scared of? You're scared of things staying the exact same. Maybe you're scared of the embarrassment of being told no in the moment. But I guarantee that slight moment of rejection in the moment is not going to matter five years from now. But if you do get that raise, that might impact your life five years from now, If you ask that person on the date you might have learned a lesson or met your soulmate, that will impact you five years
from now. So you get hung up on rejection and this fear of being told no. I want you to reframe your mind and realize anything that you are going to not be given, anything that is going to be rejection, is not a loss. It's actually a gain because if you were supposed to have those things, and you were supposed to get that job, get that raise, be with that person, you would have because nothing in your life that's meant for you is going to pass you by. So literally, what
are you stressed about? I also relate to this one so much because, especially in high school and in all of these areas of my life where I was just younger, I was so scared of ruffling feathers. I was terrified of upsetting other people. I was scared my opinions or me advocating for myself would make other people mad. What I have learned today is that when other people advocate for themselves in my presence, I'm not mad. So why would somebody else be mad if I did the same? And why am I valuing
the state of other people's feathers more than I'm valuing my own. At the end of the day, the only person who was actually looking out for us, like in an offense, take real ass way, is ourselves. The only person who has your back one hundred percent of the time is you. So if you are not going to advocate for yourself out of fear for upsetting those around you, I need you to ask yourself who am I surrounding myself
with. Once you accept those hard truths, it's time to get tangibly better at having these difficult conversations, because really we're not a great communicator because of underlying fears. It's not that you're a bad communicator by nature, you just haven't gotten comfortable with some of the uncomfortable elements of conversation, like the conflict or what if I say something silly. What if I feel rejected? What
if I come across as awkward? Once you embrace and accept those fears, that's the only place you'll really be able to build from so that you can build your actual communication skills. The first thing I want to say is you cannot be a strong communicator if you are not a strong and clear thinker. If your mind is scattered and your thought process is scattered, nothing you say
is going to have value. You're not going to have a zillion thoughts in your head and then how be able to make it clear and concise when you're communicating. So you need to make sure that you are very mindful about what your intentions are before you speak, And in casual conversation you don't need to
premeditate all of your answers. But sometimes if you take time to exercise throughout the day, whether that is physically or mentally by things like meditation or yoga, you'll really get into a better rhythm of understanding how does my body feel and my feeling stressed? What am I thinking? Is that making me feel stressed? How can I slow down my breath and my thoughts so that I'm in more of a healthy flow. Getting in tune with how your mind works
is absolutely invaluable. You also need to go into every conversation assuming the best in the person that you are speaking too. If you go into especially difficult conversations thinking this person is an asshole, this person is dumb, this person is that, you are not going to go anywhere. You need to authentically see and assume the best in every single person you speak to, because when you extend empathy to others, not only is it the right thing to do,
but that empathy comes all the way back to you. It's also really important to be thoughtful about the kinds of language that you use, particularly when you're asking for things. If you're asking for a raise, if you're asking for space, if you're asking for something out of anybody in your life, or if you're trying to solve a problem, it is so important that you
focus on the problem and not the person. If you are having a difficult discussion with your boss because your boss treats you like shit, you're not going to say, boss, you are so frustrating to work with. What you're going to say is when we run into these communication errors, I find it slows down my work and sometimes can add some unnecessary stress. How can we better partner and to improve our relationship to make sure we're a well oiled machine.
You really want to make sure you're coming from a place of how do we solve the problem? Not how do I attack you? Because you could be saying all of the right things, you could be factually correct, but if you don't deliver it the right way, ultimately that doesn't matter. From like a tactical communication perspective. Avoid the use of filler words. So those are words like like or um or you know, or kind of awkward pauses. Sometimes I definitely use those words, and fun fact, I don't write
scripts for my podcast episodes. I just talk, so sometimes those words do pop up. What I try to do instead is leverage pause, and that's something I would highly recommend you do in your life as well, especially when you're having one on one conversations in a professional setting. So if you are unsure of the next thing you're going to say, or you need a moment to just collect your thoughts instead of saying, you're just going to pause,
Because there's power and pause. You have to be confident in order to be comfortable in silence. So giving yourself the space to do that is actually going to be kind of a game changer as far as your career goes. Good communicators also don't rush through their words. They're comfortable taking up space, taking their time, They enunciate clearly, and they are really able to express their
emotion through what they're saying. It's all about changing the inflection of your voice, speaking at an appropriate pace, using smiling hand gestures, whatever feels natural to you, and ultimately all of that comes down to practice. Everybody has
a differnt communication style. That's why you're listening to this podcast, or maybe you know not another podcast, or maybe that's why you watch a certain show and don't watch another show because the communication style impacts you in a way that feels good, or it motivates you, or you feel connected or you feel comfortable. How we communicate impacts how people feel. The other thing that is so important that everybody forgets is that ninety percent of communication has nothing to do
with speaking. It has everything to do with listening. If you are not answering the right questions, if you're not genuinely caring about what the other person in front of you is saying, it doesn't matter how eloquent of a speaker you are. It's not going to matter because if you don't make an effort to really listen and really have high value conversations, it's going to go nowhere. So really work on your listening skills as well, and ask yourself,
am I listening just enough so that I can respond? Or am I genuinely listening so I can understand? Because there is a difference. My biggest tip, though, if you want to become a kick ass killer communicator at work in your personal life is practice, and most especially practice by putting yourself in situations that make you deeply uncomfortable. Yeah, I know that sounds horrible.
Put yourself on speed dates, put yourself in networking groups, put yourself into tech meetups in your city, go to events, meet strangers, and talk to strangers as much as possible, because number one, if you screw up and you say something awkward, nobody's going to remember. It's not like that's
your best friend you're going to talk to tomorrow. But the more comfortable you get with things like rejection, with things like having conflicting opinions, with asking for things, with advocating for yourself the easier it becomes in your day to day and you become desensitized to it. I bet you the first time you had a cup of coffee you did not like the flavor. We all just kind of grew up to start drinking it because that's what you did when you
became an adult and you got a corporate job. It's the same as small talk, it's the same as good communication. None of us are good at it. We just flex it like it's a muscle, and that's where we're able to really grow and develop. So put yourself in those positions and those situations so that you have no choice but to practice for these things. If there's one piece of information I want you to retain from this episode, it
is that you are not naturally a bad communicator. You are naturally anxious about communication and that is what's holding you back. So for you to tackle that anxiety and get to the root cause of what am I scared of? Is it rejection? Is it conflict? Is it disappointing other people? And working on that while you work on these hands on tactical communication skills, that's what is actually going to make the difference and getting comfortable being uncomfortable, like that's
ultimately all it is. I am a very good public speaker. Now, it's my job. It is what I do, and I only got good at that by putting myself in really awkward positions and awkward conversations and going to events and doing all of these things that ultimately made it feel really comfy for me. It's not like I just woke up and was good at it. Because trust me, if you saw some of my first speeches compared to now, it's like night and day difference. It's a night and day difference that
this was helpful. I know I didn't answer any of your questions this week. It's because this episode is naturally a little bit longer. Next week, I am am am going to be answering your questions. So if you do have anything or any questions you want me to answer, I have the link to submit it in the form right in the description, So just make sure
you click that send me your questions. I answer at least two or three every single week podcast episode live every single Sunday, Baby Sunday, Sunday Sunday. I need to get someone to make an audio for that, you know how, There's what are they called the Monster Truck Rallies, where it's like Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, be there Monster Truck Rally. But I want that but for the podcast, hook hook me up? Who can do that? Who can help me out with that? But honestly, guys, thank
you so much for hanging out with me. I genuinely love this show more than anything, So don't forget to leave a comment, do all of the things you can do, leave a rating, subscribe to the show if you haven't already. I love this podcast more than life itself, so just putting it out there. Thank you so much and I will talk to you next week.