The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #259 - Chuck Wisner

TRANSCRIPT

(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)

Melanie Avalon:
Hi friends, welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation that I am about to have. So the backstory on today's conversation, this is one of the books that I came across, I think from the author's agent or publisher or somebody sent it to me and I saw the title, The Art of Conscious Conversations: Transforming How We Talk, Listen and Interact. And just based on the title alone, I was pretty much an immediate yes, because I am, I mean, I was reflecting on this podcasting, I literally make my livelihood or my vocation involves capturing and recording conversations. So they're near, they're definitely near and dear to my heart. I'm really fascinated about them. And I have never done though, a deep dive into the concept of them. Reading the books, I learned all about the different types of conversations and what they're made of and how to optimize them and why they break down and what actually are promises and just so many things. I can't really express enough how much I enjoyed reading this book and how much I learned and how many questions I have. So this is really just a true honor. I am here with the author today, Chuck Wisner. I just like I said, Chuck, I have so many questions for you and you have a really, really interesting resume. So you started your career in music, then you had a midlife change with that. You became certified in mastering the art of professional coaching program with the Newfield Network.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, and excuse me, prior to that, I was an architect in Boston for many years.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh yes, you talk about that in the book. Yeah, I definitely want to hear your life story.

Chuck Wisner:
Music, architecture, and then coaching or leadership.

Melanie Avalon:
Do parts of those come into what you're doing today, like the music and the architecture?

Chuck Wisner:
Definitely, definitely. There are interesting links, different links, what connects music to what I do versus what connects architecture, but they both live on through my work.

Melanie Avalon:
I love it so much. You've been a senior affiliated mediator with the Harvard Law Mediation Program. That sounds really cool. Whenever I think about mediators, I think I go like biblical. I was raised Christian. There were always Bible verses about if you get, I think if you get in like an argument or something, you're supposed to first go find a mediator first and if you can't fix it with them, then there's like, it's like a step -by -step process. So that's what I always think of with mediators. Do you still do that? That work?

Chuck Wisner:
Rarely, sometimes someone will call on me, but generally I'm not out sort of advertising that I do that work. Sometimes there'll be conflicts that people just want a mediator and I'll gladly step into that role.

Melanie Avalon:
I think if everybody had a pocket mediator, that would be pretty helpful. Although maybe chat GPT is becoming that. Maybe. Because it's like a third party AI perspective that you could bring in.

Chuck Wisner:
Maybe there's a product there we can develop, you know? I know. A chat should be mediated.

Melanie Avalon:
It's a brainstorm. Actually, now wait, now I'm brainstorming, so I'm going to stop myself. That actually would be a really cool app. So your current work now, is it mostly you're working as an advisor to a lot of really cool companies like Google and people like that?

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, so I've had a great run with good clients and I still have a handful but I'm not taking on corporate clients. I am taking on individual clients and I'm really paying attention to the book too, doing podcasts and giving talks and writing some articles. So there's a bit of a shift going on because the book sort of has created a transition for me.

Melanie Avalon:
I like that. That works well, too, since we're having this conversation right now. So the book, so did you have just a moment one day in epiphany where you wanted to write it or what led to the evolution of actually, you know, initially bringing proverbial pen to paper or maybe actual pen to paper, if you're that type.

Speaker 3
type.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, well it's

Melanie Avalon:
That's a 10 -year story. Maybe actual pen to paper then.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, yeah. So really, there's two birthing seeds, I guess I'd say. One is, as I was working with executives at different companies and teaching things that I learned around language and my studies in the ontology of language that really combine emotional intelligence and meditation and understanding of the power of language, the philosophy of language, and all those things were combining. And so we did transformational work with people and they would say, well, what book can I read? And then I realized that, well, you can read these linguists who are like Searle and Austin who are really philosophy of language folks that are really difficult to read. You can read Peter Senge, you can read about meditation. But there was no book that tried to combine everything. And so that was the first time I thought about it. And then about four years later, I was having a cocktail with a client of probably eight years who said, I love all this work and everything we're learning, but I'm not sure how to connect the dots because there are all these pieces of building trust and commitment conversations and emotional intelligence and meditation. How do we connect the dots? And as I stood on that for a bit and one day I was walking on the beach and it dawned on me that something I learned when I was studying language was this notion of different types of conversations. And it dawned on me, and this is probably the architect in me, that said, wait a minute, that would be a perfect structure to connect all the dots and hold all the pieces together. And then I started thinking about writing it. I structured the book. I didn't trust myself as a writer because it feels like it was a new career. So I hired some folks to help me. That never worked out. And then the last time it didn't work out with a writer or an editor. I said, screw this. I'm going to do it myself. And I had the structure there, but I had to go back and start all over because what happened is I hired writers or editors actually. My voice would disappear because their voice would come in. And so I said, you know what? I can do this myself. I had to bust my own story that I couldn't write and start it back at the beginning and put my voice and my experiences and my examples back in the book. Sorry, that's a long -winded answer.

Melanie Avalon:
No, no, I love it. That's awesome. I love that you have that journey to, you know, actually writing it yourself and no worries to people who, you know, do work with writers and editors and outsource it, but that's super awesome that, you know, your authenticity is really coming through then. Well, it's fabulous. So you have the writing skills, so we're good there. So I'm curious, you know, you talked about just now and throughout the book, these types of conversations. So when you were thinking about that and like structuring it as an architect in your head, did you have to go and look and find those types or were they pretty much already intuitive to you? I find it really interesting that once you learn a new paradigm or a new way of saying things in the world, then you see it everywhere. So I'm just curious, like that process of how did you come up with the four main types?

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, so I can't claim creating them. When I studied with two wonderful teachers, Julio Echeverria and Rafael Echeverria and Julio Elaya, they, in their studies, which was called Mastering the Art of Professional Coaching, the Ontology of Language, inside of that body of work, we dissected our conversations by using different types of conversations. And so it was in that body of work, and then, which I sort of like, it was in the background on my head, but then it popped up as a structure for the book. So, and it's very powerful because it is a structure, it is like a blueprint that helps hold a lot of different, very different concepts together.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, okay, gotcha. And maybe can we, because I have so many questions, but just so that the audience can understand what world we're swimming in. So like, what are the the basic types of conversations that people can have? Like, what are we having right now?

Chuck Wisner:
Right now, we are in a more or less we're in a storytelling conversation where and somewhat so the four conversations are storytelling, collaborative, creative, and commitment conversations. And they're they're all distinct. They're all interrelated and integral to one another. But they're all distinct because each one has different tools and different practices, practices, and things to learn to help us navigate conversations better. So right now, we are in a storytelling conversation. You're asking me questions to learn about my story and to learn about the book. The storytelling conversation is really foundational. It's fundamental to all the others because we humans live in stories. We thrive on stories and they're they're beautiful. We tell our stories. We love fiction. We entertain one another. We connect with one another. Cocktail parties are storytelling conversations. So they're really beautiful. But they have a very intense side as well, which is more about the stories that we hold that we actually get somewhat our ego taps into. And when that happens, we have stories that don't serve us well, but we live through them. And so that's the hard work of storytelling conversation, which is more internal than it is external. And it's looking at the stories that help us versus harm us. And they're very intense. They can be life -changing if we can investigate them and then navigate through them. Just that one example of me, I had a story that wasn't a good enough writer. And literally, I had to bust that story that that wasn't true. So that's the work inside storytelling. And I think there's examples in the book about other stories that I had to bust of my own and then client examples as well. The second one is collaboration. So if you and I embarked on an idea to create our app, yeah, we would want to do that through a collaborative conversation. And we all know how to advocate and inquire and ask questions or tell our story or tell our position. But we aren't trained to do that very well. We're trained to be sort of aggressive, assertive advocates. And we're trained to ask questions in inquisition ways instead of opening ways. So again, that conversation is a real art inside of that conversation of how to balance and how to do that dance. So the more artfully we can do that dance, the more success we would probably have of creating a really cool product. That then weaves into the creative conversation. And that means that if, let's say, you and I have spent a lot of time together and we're learning from each other. We're like, oh, wow, I wonder about this and we could do this and we could do this. That sort of morphs into, in an open conversation where we're aligned, like the creative conversation just sort of emerges. It's like ideas bubble up. Things might come, solutions and ideas might come up that you didn't have in your head, I didn't have in my head. But through the collaborative conversation, we co -create. There's that aspect. And then there's the aspect of the creative conversation, which is about our right brain versus our left brain or our rational cells versus our intuitive selves. So there's a lot of depth there. And then the last conversation, rather than it being opening and opening, it's always about saying, okay, now we have to make a decision. The commitment conversation is the action conversation. What are we going to do? Who's doing what by when to what satisfaction? And we live in that conversation every day and we know nothing about it. We make sloppy promises. We have addictions of how we do it. We have patterns of how we do it that make for sloppy promises. So learning how it works and how it unfolds and either creates trust or creates distrust is a very powerful way that we can create action, coordinate action with other people in a more productive way.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, I love it and I think listeners can now see why there's so much content here and why I have so many questions. So going back to the the storytelling one the first type of conversations So I had quite a few epiphanies reading that part of the book. One of the things was you talked about how storytelling conversations are the bedrock of conversations and how the one consistent thing in all conversations Is your own stories and I was like, oh, that's so true. Like that's like it's like the the only thing that's like omnipresent for everything which is I mean a Little worrisome when you think about how we think we're seeing the world objectively and we think we're actually hearing people But really, you know, everything's coming from our perspective. So, I mean, it's a wonder that we even get this this far honestly Which actually comes to? Something I loved that you said and I actually was telling a friend about this yesterday You talk about how and maybe you can expand on this a little bit But you talk about a theory that you have about Our inner versus outer conversations and the gap between them and how that relates to stress I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that because I I just found that really powerful and I've started to notice it in myself about you know When that gap exists and what it means for you know for me

Chuck Wisner:
So to start, the distinction is between our private conversations, the conversations in our head and the public words that we speak as if we were being recorded. So our internal stories are really rich and productive and also potentially negative or can be very negative. And the important thing I like to say at the outset is that all the habits we have and all the stories that run in our head, they're like habits, they're just like we adopted them from our families, we adopted them from our culture, teachers. And they become automatic because we almost, mostly unconsciously adopt them. What I like to say is I like to call them patterns. And I'm not sure how much I went into this in the book, but I like to call them patterns because it takes a bit of the judgmental sting out of the idea of I have a bad habit. So we have these patterns and they also exist in our thoughts and our worries and our concerns and the stories inside of our head, which often in some circles like meditation circles is called the monkey mind. In other circles it's called the committee. And the interesting thing is I study with some folks, Hal Stone and Sidra Stone. Some 20 years ago we were doing voice dialogue work. And the idea is that we all have multiple personalities and multiple voices. And what we have to do is learn to, first of all, acknowledge them and then rather than berate them and try to beat them out of existence, which our ego likes to do, we befriend them and we realize, oh my gosh, let's see a small example. I used to get them when my kids were very young and things weren't going well. They were two boys, rambunctious. My wife got upset and I would flip. And just like in a minute, a second, I would flip and I would get really angry and I get really loud and then everyone ended up crying. And what I realized, what that pattern was, was I turned into my father. I turned into Charlie because it was a pattern I adopted when he got upset. He was loud and more painful than that. So I realized that that was a pattern I had that when I investigate my internal conversation, my internal story about that, my internal thoughts about that, I was able to deconstruct it and realize, wait a minute, I don't have to do that. That's my dad. And that was a pattern like was an automatic pilot pattern. So I just want to frame that up to say we have to be gentle on ourselves when we start investigating our private conversations because I've done this exercise with a thousand people. It's not pretty. And the public conversations are literally the words we speak out loud. So the exercise, I think I put this in the book, the exercise is you take a piece of paper, you divide it and align down the middle vertically. And on the right side, you put in a conversation what you said and what the other person said. I said, what do you think about the project? She said, it's too soon to tell. I said, well, we're running out of time and we're over budget. She says, no, we're going to be fine. We have four or five exchanges. And then you go back and you write down what you were thinking and feeling during the whole conversation. Thinking and feeling when I was speaking and what was I thinking and feeling when she was speaking. And I can tell you that many, many people that I've done this with are shocked when they actually write their private conversation down on paper. And I ask them, so what's in it? What is it? What are you finding? They said, well, what did you find when you did that? When you think about that, what do you find is in your private conversation?

Melanie Avalon:
what I find most, because I've become a lot more aware of this, because I mentioned it. You said that you think stress comes oftentimes from thinking one thing and saying a different thing and how big is that gap there. And actually, so the friend I was telling this about the other day, the reason I told him about it was it's somebody I had newly met. So he was a new acquaintance. And then we had our first phone call to get to know each other. And so afterwards, I was reflecting on the conversation and I was thinking about what were the moments in that conversation where I didn't say, like where I felt like I wanted to say something that I didn't say. So I actually sent a voice message and I told him about this and I was like, I'm just auditing the conversation we had. And there's one thing I didn't say that I want to say now. And then we actually went into a whole rabbit hole talking about this whole concept. So I was really excited to talk to you about it.

Chuck Wisner:
And it probably, I would suspect, that it deepened your conversation a little bit.

Melanie Avalon:
It did, it did. And actually where we went from there and what I've been thinking about with this exercise is because you can really clearly see, I think, when you... I mean, I didn't actually write it down on paper. I probably should have. I was doing it more in my head. But, you know, you can see clearly things that are not lining up or things that you wish you had said or maybe things you wish you hadn't said.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, or like judgments that you can't say out loud.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, and exactly. And so that actually relates to what I've been thinking about is because I do think there's, you know, being authentic is, you know, probably a big key here. And there should be alignment and synchronicity between what we're thinking and what we're saying. At the same time, I'm assuming we're not supposed to say everything like we, you know, we do have our secrets. And where's the line between that matching between what you're saying and thinking? Versus knowing just what to say and what not to say.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah. In conversations where you are feeling connected to the person and you pretty much, maybe there's many situations where the gap is very small versus the gap is very large between the private and the public. The trouble is that when we do this exercise and you go back and look at your private conversation on paper, and I would recommend you do it on paper, it's a very different process because you use neural networks or neural networks to tune in differently. When we do it and look at it, and so I ask, so what would happen if you just said everything when your private conversation? Across the board, the answer is not pretty, not like a career -limiting move, you know? You say to your boss, you are such a jerk. That's not good because it can destroy relationships, it can change how people feel about one another, and it can hijack a project or something we're doing together. The other side is, okay, but if you can't just blur it out, then it's the option to stuff it. We all know that if we have really judgmental thoughts or negative thoughts and we're just constantly stuffing, that's not good for us physically, health -wise. It's not good for us mentally, emotionally, spiritually. I like the analogy of like, well, you know when there's a killing or something and someone hurts someone in their neighborhood and all the neighbors say, well, he was such a nice quiet guy, but if he had all this stuff inside that he never knew how to work with or process, it's like stuffing a toxic oil tank with more and more toxicity until it either leaks or it explodes. That's not a good option. What I try to do in the book is say, really, what we have to do is learn to process. We process our private conversation by using the four archetypal elements that I introduced in the book because we find out that in our judgment, in our strong opinion, in our disagreement, if we take it apart and just take it apart a little bit, a little bit, we find little golden nuggets. In a way, that's what you did. You thought about your private conversation with your friend and you said, oh, this piece doesn't seem scary. This doesn't seem hurtful. Why can't I speak that? You did a little bit of processing there, which then changed the dynamic of the conversation.

Melanie Avalon:
Can you exercise that part of your brain so that you can do it more in real time, or is it always gonna be more retroactive looking back?

Chuck Wisner:
Most of the things we're talking about in the book require a practice, right? There's no magical switch like you read about how to do this and all of a sudden there's a switch. I say to my clients, okay, if you never want to feel that again or do that again, I have a magic switch and would you pay me $10 ,000 and I'll make the switch and then you'll never do that again. Of course, everyone says, yes, I'd pay you. I'd be a rich man. But there's no magic switch. It is a practice and it's a process but it does evolve. Something happens in real time which is like a vertical line of now and then if you swing right or left, it doesn't matter, you swing and you go, oh, two hours later you go, oh, gosh, I wish I would have said that or I wish I hadn't said that, right? You do a little bit of processing there and you say, wow, I could have said this because that would have been helpful or I can process and bring a little golden nugget from my private conversation. Then you're sort of closing that gap. Maybe it happens again but now you catch it two minutes later and then with more practice, you're catching it real time. There is a process but there is hope that we can get better and better at it. Generally, I don't have a lot of private conversations that I can't process real time and also I'm in a wonderful marriage so I can actually say to my wife, my private conversation, not about her but about someone else and I can process it out loud, right? Because that's really helpful too and she knows that I'm not trying to be judgmental. I'm catching and then I'm trying to say, okay, what good can come out of this or what can I shift? Does that all make sense?

Melanie Avalon:
It does, it does. And on the flip side, do you think with the continued advent and evolution of social media, where it seems like people just say everything that they think all the time, is that having a negative backwards effect and that it's encouraging us to say too much?

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah. Well, yes, I think it's, yes, it does. But I think it's because the social media allows you to be more or less anonymous. Your name might be there, but you're not face -to -face with somewhere. You can feel their emotions and you can feel them upset or you can feel the consequences of your nasty words, right? So, it's not helping us as a human species, I don't believe. And that's not to say that social media can't, isn't, can be good. I mean, you know, we just have to, it's such a new technology, we have to figure out how to harness the best of it instead of be addicted to the worst of it.

Melanie Avalon:
Not to go on a complete tangent, but one of the things I found really interesting was you mentioned earlier that the left -right brain distinction, you were talking about how maybe you can talk a little bit about what that actually means and what we should learn from that. But you were talking about the role of AI assuming doing the right brain test it would be doing or left brain. I get them confused.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, yeah. So the left brain is our rational… So it would be doing left brain. Yeah, it's sort of our literal self, right? Which is based on what we know and what we don't know. Our right brain is really our intuitive self. Actually, it was Einstein who said we have it backwards because since the Industrial Revolution, well, a little before that, but we've grown as cultures and countries and economies really valuing the left brain. Have the answer, figure out the problem, figure out the answer, be the smartest one in the room, and all of that. That's how we're educated. That's how we're rewarded in business. But he really had made a distinction that, in fact, the right brain is a much broader contextual… Sort of takes in a lot of information and also including emotional information and gut information. And that's actually a huge driver of what we do. So you can be focused on the left brain, the literal self, but the right brain is really doing all the work in the background, and the left brain is a servant of the right brain. So Einstein turned it around in that way. So what we need to do is reconnect with our right brain and really allow ourselves to be creative and not jump to conclusions, not jump to answers. I was helping a friend who got herself in trouble a few weeks ago. She did something out of the ordinary for her and someone was going to press charges. She was telling me about how she was throwing to lawyers and the person that she grieved. She had an answer and then we spent 15 minutes on the phone. I said, well, what about thinking about it this way? What about thinking about it this way? Here's another possibility. Within 10 or 15 minutes, we came up with a possibility that wasn't on either of our minds. That was a much better solution for her. That was giving ourselves that time to say, okay, let's just think. Let's be creative. Let's brainstorm ideas. Let's do it. We can actually develop that side, but we're not well -trained to do that.

Melanie Avalon:
I know the reason I get them confused. It's because I'm a really visual learner and then doesn't the like the left side of the brain control the right side of your body and the right side of the brain controls the left side of your body. So in my head, I have this like visual of it being crisscrossed. And I think I like I impose on that like, which means which and then I think it's backwards. So I just I cannot keep them straight from my life. Like it's embarrassing. I should know. I should know by now the differences.

Chuck Wisner:
We can also just talk literal versus intuitive, or rational versus intuitive, because we aren't gonna do much about changing what goes on up there from left to right, yeah.

Melanie Avalon:
people who are more like the artsy type and creative. And like, even for me, I would always score 50 50. Like, you know, when you would take like the, I don't know if it's IQ test or different tests, like I would always be like equal for like the math versus the reading. Is that, is that the two, like the way they test us for the two options?

Chuck Wisner:
No, I think those are all pretty IQ related that are that are pretty still much pretty much still left left brain oriented. Yeah. Okay.

Melanie Avalon:
So, do you find people who are more – because you just said now that we have to more focus on growing that right -brained side. Are some people more naturally like that and how does that affect their conversations?

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, I think that's a complicated issue because it goes to the nurture versus nature issue. I do think some of us, by nature, probably—well, we all know about neurodiversity and all that kind of stuff. By nature, our brains work in different ways. I have clients and relatives that are neurodiverse. They're incredibly talented in one area, but in social skills and things, the brain just doesn't connect the dots. So there's that element. So we all have a different chemistry there. But the nurture part is true, too, because how we're educated and then how we're rewarded in business or to be successful is pretty much left brain -oriented. Right? But now, in the last, what, 40 years or so or 50 years, meditation and yoga and all of those things are much more right brain -oriented where you give yourself space and time to breathe and let your mind wander and do all those things. That's how we can practice reengaging our intuitive selves and just learning to have fun with it and listen. I'm pretty sure I tell the story in the book because one of my favorite things is to go out—I have a garden, pretty magical. One of my favorite things is just to say, you know, today, I just want to get my hands dirty. I want to be outside. But I don't go out with a plan. I go out and I just purposefully go, okay, let's just see how this unfolds. Sure enough, even without a plan, things happen. You know, something calls to me or my chainsaw isn't working, so I have to work on that for an hour. But, you know, that notion of just trusting your intuitive self to let life unfold, that's another way that we can practice and develop our appreciation of our intuitive selves.

Melanie Avalon:
So my hybrid version that works really well for me, but I'm wondering if I need to go beyond that is I can plan a time to not have plans. So I can plan that space, but that space has to be planned. So that time has to have a beginning and an end, and then I can exist within that without a plan. But the idea of just not having a plan, I just would panic a little bit.

Chuck Wisner:
No, I think what you're doing is fine. I have my yoga meditation routine every morning, but I know that that's the best time for me to do it. You could call that being planned, right? But then in those times, I'm allowing myself to be in that space. So that's fine. And I would say experiment with little things like, well, what would happen if you didn't have a plan? I get this sounds scary for a day.

Melanie Avalon:
I know. I'm like the visceral feeling I'm having right now. I just, I don't know.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, but what I can guarantee you is, here's my experience, and I'm not saying that everyone has to do it this way, but my experience after these many years is that, intuitively, I know what's important. Intuitively, I know what has to be taken care of. I mean, I have lists of things, so I don't forget something, like to take care of something, but intuitively, I sort of trust that the right things will show up, and then I take care of them. That's a long, long practice I've been doing. It's a very deep subject, because in some ways, it gets in the idea of how much we're controlling versus how much we're not controlling. That's a whole other subject that I didn't even... I don't think I broached in the book.

Melanie Avalon:
You talked about it very briefly. You talked about, is it Byron, or somebody talking about the...

Chuck Wisner:
Byron Katie, yeah. Or Byron Katie, yeah.

Melanie Avalon:
the control, things you can control or not.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, she does really good work. Yeah, her book, I can't remember the name of her first book, but her website is called TheWork .com, I think. And her basic premise is the idea of how we fight reality. Like when we're upset or in a tough conversation, there's usually a thread there of us not accepting what has happened. And what has happened, we can do nothing to change. Literally, it's done. And then we stew, and we worry, and we get sick, and we get depressed because we didn't like what happened. That's the basic premise of her work. And that is a practice that gets us into realizing life is unfolding and it doesn't always unfold according to Melanie or according to Chuck, right? And we can't accept life as it goes up. Then we're going to suffer, we're going to have more private conversations, then we're going to have shitty conversations with other people because we're stressed out or we're upset. I was a bit of a virgin there, but I think we connected the dots.

Melanie Avalon:
actually relates to still talking about the storytelling conversations, a big topic that you talk about, which is the role of facts. I'm a little bit haunted by facts because, so like I mentioned earlier, my upbringing, so I was raised really Christian. So it was like a world of absolute truth and like, you know, very intense in that world. And then as my thinking evolved, I started realizing how we all have completely different opinions and perspectives of everything. So I was like, how can we know anything? Like, how do I know that my brain is not just like making up a story and telling it to me? And this is all a simulation. Like, I don't know, could be. So the question with facts is how I'm still haunted by this, like how because you mentioned how facts can be kind of like, I don't know if this is the word you use, but kind of like play a salvation role when we have stories not clashing or not aligning because, you know, they can show the reality of the situation. But how do you even agree on the facts if people have different perspectives?

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, so it's important to so there's three basic components in our stories. There's our emotions, which are real, and they're very chemically based, right? Because something happens in the world, our brain takes in a billion bits of information or billion bits of data based on our history and our beliefs, actually the story creating part of our brain and that in a millisecond, it says, here's what's happening. Unfortunately, it's a mix of it drives your emotions and then you have all your emotional reactions. There's facts get buried and they get messed up and the facts and the opinions get very sort of our ears don't even hear them differently and we don't even speak them differently. So how do we how do we take care of that? First, we realize that our emotions are our emotions are a physiological expression of our thinking. For many people, they don't think of it that way. So if you have an emotion where you're sad or happy or jealous or frustrated, the reason you're feeling that is because you have an internal story that is telling you something wasn't fair or something shouldn't have happened or whatever, whatever it is. So we have to look at the underbelly story to really understand, better understand our emotions so that we can we can manage them better that sort of how emotional intelligence comes in. But the facts are not that, you know, stories are stories. I mean, you had you grew up Christian, you know, someone else grew up as a Muslim, someone else grew up as Jewish, someone else grew up as an atheist. What's ironic about that is people forget that those are myths and those are stories. There's facts inside of them of what happened historically, but they take on this larger, larger mythology. And then I can say, oh, put Melanie, my story about religion is true. Your story? I don't think so. You know, I hope your story is really screwed up. Well, and we all know that that that leads to many, many wars and things. So let me see, I'll tell a little story to understand facts. So in the book I talk about, I grew up with a story that I wasn't a big enough man from my redneck grandfather, who I had three older sisters, and I had this grandfather, he was a step grandfather, that was a real redneck and probably a racist. Anyway, when I cried, or when I didn't want to skin the deer, or when I didn't want to kill the bunny, or I didn't want to do whatever I was expected to do as a man, the message I got was, you're not a big enough man, you know, man up, you know, like stop crying, stop being emotional. I was the youngest of four, so my sister was, my sisters could do all those things, but I couldn't. Anyway, that story that got embedded in my psyche, and it wasn't until I studied the power of language or the philosophy of language that I was able to bust that story. And one way I busted that story was to say, wait, let me, and I was working with the teachers I mentioned, they made me write this, they made me write a paper about this. Okay, so let's start with, what are you feeling? I feel insecure, I feel not good enough, I get embarrassed. Okay, what are the facts? And at that point, I was married, happily married, I had two young, very young children, sons, I was an architect, I was becoming a partner, I was 5 '11", all those facts, but wait a minute, that, to me, that starts defining a pretty successful man, right? And so that, those were facts of reality that were in complete disagreement with what my message I got from my grandfather. And so that was the beginning of me unwinding that story. And then until I realized that, whoa, not only the facts, but my grandfather had a standard about what a man should be. And I'm not blaming him because he was taught, he adopted a standard probably from his father and his grandfather. So he was taking his standard and applying it to me because that's all he knew. But then when I was an older man, and I could take this apart, I go, okay, the facts don't line up. And by the way, his standard of what a man is and my standard of what a man is aren't aligned. And literally, that's how I was able to bust that story. So facts are... Facts have to be things that you can't disagree on and there is no such thing as alternative facts. I mean that's bullshit so So if you and I were in a conversation of disagreement, I would say okay What what are the three things that we can agree happened? What is what's reality telling us? Right and and that's a foundational. That's a good foundation to start any conversation that's in conflict

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, so basically facts are it's like if you got multiple people in a room, we would all agree based on our senses that this physical thing or like we would all agree something happened or is existing in a certain way. It's like very fact -based.

Chuck Wisner:
That's right. If someone, we were in a meeting and someone lost their temper and they turned red in the face and they threw a pencil across the room and they hit Melanie in the head and other people screamed, all of those are facts. Now, what we do with them, then we slide into perspective opinion land and now everybody's history and everybody's brain working in its own way, takes those facts and emotions that they feel and they spin their story. They spin their opinion and that's where things get messy. Facts aren't messy. Opinions are messy.

Melanie Avalon:
So what about things, because I can think of some pretty hot topics where people probably think they're both speaking facts, and yet the facts would conflict, the alternative facts. So something like global warming, people might say on one side, yes, it's getting warmer, that's a fact. And then other people on the other side might say, yes, it's warmer, but it's always, this is like the way it just happens, and this is like a cycle, so it's not global warming. So where does the fact come in, and where does the story come in there?

Chuck Wisner:
So subjects like that that are complex, let's just call it a complex subject, which is different than me being a big enough man, and I think what has happened, I don't know how long it's been. It feels to me like the last 10 years or 12 years, maybe more, maybe longer. When we have complex issues like that, we have to rely on expertise. We have to trust that science is telling us the best they know, given what they're able to know, and I think we've lost that respect for expertise and the foundation of science. Science is ever -evolving, but whatever we know now, we know now, and then 10 years from now, it might be different, but I think we've lost that expertise. In climate change, yeah, there are people that deny, but then if you really carefully look at the experts, it's something like 98 percent of experts, whether they're in institutions or government or private nonprofits that are studying, pretty much 98 percent agree on what's happening, and so that is something we need to reacquaint ourselves in and have a conversation about that rather than just fighting over, fighting whether it's true or not true or whether what the cause was. We have to go a little deeper and go, okay, but let's put on the table what do we know? What is science telling us? What are experts telling us? When we deny that, society thrives on that expertise. We have to, you know, sane societies thrive on agreeing on certain things, otherwise it'd be all chaos, so I'm not sure that answers your question except to recognize that it's complex and I think we have to reacquaint ourselves with trusting some things that we've shunned.

Melanie Avalon:
It's really interesting, just as a paradigm in general, that there are these topics where you think would be fact -based. So it's really interesting that people can get into such intense arguments on either side, which says to me there must be just a lot of story enmeshed in our perception of the facts, I guess, because I don't know how otherwise we'd be so argumentative

Speaker 3
over them.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, I was in a men's group for a bit, online men's group, and it happened right before the, I think during COVID. And it turned out that the majority of these men somehow went down the rabbit hole of QAnon. And no matter what I did to introduce facts and bring our conversation to a place where we could agree on a few things, they just couldn't go there. I just decided that I, you know, I bowed out of that conversation because I don't want to waste my energy on people that can't have that conversation.

Melanie Avalon:
That's actually a good question. We haven't talked yet about, like, you know, commitment conversations and then how those break down and, you know, when to exit a conversation, which kind of relates to what you're saying right now. But so maybe, maybe before that, maybe we could talk a little bit about the commitment conversations because like you mentioned earlier in the show, you were saying how like with promises and stuff, how we, we do these every day and they're often sloppy and we don't even realize that I know for me, it's funny. I got really, I get really excited when somebody talks about something in a book that I personally have experienced a lot or thought about, which is very nuanced and specific. And then when I see it talked about, I'm like, oh, this is actually a thing. So for example, you, you talk about how people use the word ASAP and it's a very sloppy word to use. And it's funny because I use that word very measuredly because every time I use it, I think, I think I, I literally had this whole conversation in my head. Every time I use the word ASAP, which I, which is, that word is ironic because when you use it, it makes it seem like I'm going to try to, it's going to happen fast. Like I'm going to do this, you know, really quickly. But the actual word is as soon as possible. So it actually means that you have time. You're going to do it just as soon as possible. So I never say ASAP like as an acronym because I know it evokes something different than what it's saying. I write out as soon as possible. And I only put that if I really need to communicate that I want to do it fast, but I will do it as soon as possible. Like I am very intense with this word. And so you literally talk about, you talk about ASAP in the book. And I was like, oh my goodness. That was like a very specific example, but that that's an example though of like, I think sort of making a promise or commitment by using that word. Okay. Bringing this back. How do we throughout our daily lives often make promises and commitments that we, you know, don't mean, or how's that manifesting all the time?

Chuck Wisner:
Let me just backtrack a little bit because it'll weave into the answer to that question. The four archetypal elements that I mentioned a little bit earlier, there are four elements that are literally embedded in every thought process, every judgment, every conversation we have. And the reason I developed these is to give people a bit of a shortcut to A, investigate their own thinking and B, reconsider their conversations with other people. And the four elements are desires, concerns, authority, or power issues, and standards. I don't have to go into a lot of detail. We all know what our desires are. They're great. We set goals. They also have a dark side. Concerns about the future are really great. They also have a dark side. Power issues, in every conversation, there are power issues, positive and dark, light and dark. And standards, which I mentioned in my story about my grandfather, he had a standard of what a man was. I realized I didn't have to have the same standard. Every judgment, everything we like, dislike is based on mostly probably an internal standard we have that we didn't even adopt consciously. So anyway, I wanted to just bookmark those because then when we start talking about commitment, those play out in the collaborative conversation and they play out in the creative conversation and they play out in the commitment conversation. So the commitment conversation is literally how we coordinate action with other people. It's like whether I'm talking about my wife and I agreeing on who cleans up the kitchen or who takes out the trash or whatever. Those are minor little ways that we agree on coordinating action in life. Then we go to business and we actually work with our kids. Then we go into business and we're in a hierarchy and everything is done by commitments. We make promise after promise after promise. It's like a chain. Think of it as a chain of promises. But if one of those links breaks, the whole chain is weaker. How is it manifested at home? It manifests at work. Who's going to do what? What are responsibilities? Who's judging? Who has a decision -making power? That's how it's embedded in our everyday life. Is that clear? Yes. What we have is because we never even had the concept of commitment conversation in our head, we learned how to do it through our families, our family, our cultures and our friends and our teachers and our businesses. We just do it and we do it on autopilot. We make commitments from my perspective. We make commitments too fast in a very sloppy way. We have patterns of why that happens and how that happens. Why they're sloppy and why we make them too fast. Because we just have these automatic patterns that play out.

Melanie Avalon:
So something I think about a lot there, because going back to my upbringing again, the value or the virtue that my mom instilled in us the most, I always find it really interesting. I think how, you know, which value is focused on is like the value. So the value in my family was honesty. The worst thing you could do was lie, like do not lie, which I actually really, really like that as a foundation. I think it's really helped, you know, my evolution and my, the way I engage with the world. And it's, and it's filtered down even into how I make promises, I think, because I just am really aware of what I'm saying. And if I'm going to, if I, like if I say I'm going to do something, I really want to make sure that, you know, I can do it. But it's interesting because I got in a, I've had quite a few conversations actually with a fellow guest I found on the show a few times, Dave Asprey, that my audience probably is really familiar with. We've had a lot of conversations about this because I will say, I won't say I'm going to do something if I'm not sure if I can do it. So I'll say that I'll try. And he'll say, you shouldn't use that word because that's like a limiting word. Like you should just say that you'll do these things. Like if they're, if they're like goals or things like that. I'm like, but no, because that's not, I'll try to do it. I don't know if I'll do it. And it's not me. And maybe that's just a different perspective on it, but that's something that's haunted me. But the line between with goals and desires for things like, should I say yes, I'm going to do this. Or should I keep saying like, I'll try. Like how, how intense should we be with our awareness of what we're promising to ourselves, I guess of what we're going to do.

Chuck Wisner:
Oh, I think it's I think again, just like we talked about in storytelling, we should be really more aware and more conscious of what we how we the commitments we make to ourselves because they can be really helpful and they can be really damaging because we fail and then when we fail, we beat up on ourselves and then we beat up on ourselves and we're going to just spiral, you know, so it's a tricky business. By the way, your mother teaching you about not lying. That's that's a standard that you developed that you adopted from your family and that's a great. That's a good standard. Not everybody has that standard. Not everybody can live up to that standard. People might even have a goal to do that, but but but for some reason, they fail and so we have to just be careful about how we how kind we are to ourselves. When we can't keep a commitment to ourselves. So if we if we know that exists, then we should be careful about the commitments we do make and I believe in small things. I believe in making small commitments and trying things. Can I do that for a day or can I do that for a week or I'll take this first step and if I can do that, then I can take a second step. We tend to make commitments in bigger chunks and and then, you know, like they're so it's so complicated about what happens in the world and. What happens in our relationships that play out whether we can't keep or can't keep. I mean, just look at the people the endemic around people not being satisfied with their weight or what they eat or how much they exercise. I mean, we go around and around in circles on those things. I'm never going to do that again. Well, there's no magic button. There's no magic switch. So the bad habits we have around commitments are we are many, many ways, especially in business have an addiction to. Yes. Okay.

Melanie Avalon:
talking about this. Yes.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, so, you know, and then on top of that, in business, families too, whether we like it or not, they're hierarchies. We give different people's voices different authority. Well, in business, people's voices have authority because they have more stripes in me, so that that power issue exists. If someone flies by my desk and says, hey, can you give me a PowerPoint slide by my PowerPoint on this subject on our quarterly financials on Monday, I say, sure. And then I spend the weekend putting a 30 -deck PowerPoint deck together, and I give it to someone, my boss on Monday, and they take a quick look and they go, what? This isn't what I wanted, right? So that's an example of, like, I said, sure. And what she wanted and what I thought she wanted, we were on the same page. So we, my sure, shortcut it, a good commitment conversation. And what a good commitment conversation would have looked like was for me to say, OK, just give me five minutes. Let me understand why you want this, who's it for. Do you want PowerPoint? Do you want bullets? Do you want pictures? Do you want, you know, just me asking three or four questions about what would good look like or who's it for and what are you trying to accomplish? And she would answer those three or four questions. I wouldn't have spent the weekend and then been disappointed Monday morning.

Melanie Avalon:
And that's the conversational bypass.

Chuck Wisner:
Yes. Oh, gosh, you remember that. Yes. The conversational bypass is the four conversation stories, collaborative, creative, commitment. We love our stories, we love telling our stories, and we love the action conversation, the commitment conversation. We're in a meeting and people tell their stories, and then the person with the most power or the loudest voice or people respect the most say, okay, what are we going to do? Then we jump to action. Well, what's missing is that 10 or 15 minutes of what different perspectives in the room or what are the different ways we could look at this and what are the different possible ways we could solve this problem. Those two juicy conversations of collaboration and creative, which are not very skilled at, totally get bypassed. We end up making decisions that we often have to revisit or say, oh gosh, we didn't have all the information we should have had to make that decision. So that was good of you to remember the bypass.

Melanie Avalon:
It's another example of something where, you know, I never had a word for it, but now that I understand the concept, you know, you see it everywhere. And even looking back on my life, I can really see, so like when I first started having assistants and things like that for the shows and everything, I feel like I really quickly learned this whole concept because I would, there's quite a few times where there'd be like a task, kind of like the example you gave, you know, the assistant would, or whoever, would spend a lot of time on it or do something and then have the deliverables at the end and they just weren't, you know, right. And the conversation that would happen after that would be that they didn't want to bother me with questions, which relates to the hierarchy thing.

Chuck Wisner:
That's right, it's a power issue.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. So then I started saying going forward to everybody that I work with, I'm like, ask all the questions, like ask me questions. If you have questions, like, like ask them and like, I definitely, you know, don't worry about bothering me or anything like that. Like, ask me the questions so we can make sure we're like on the same page before you put in the time and effort.

Chuck Wisner:
Right. Yeah. And just to put a finer point on that, if you can remember, I mean, if people take nothing away from this, but the four elements and write them on a sticky note, you know, desires, concerns, authority, and standards, because if you take those and apply it to commitment conversation, okay, desires, what are we trying to accomplish by making the presentation? Who's it for, a power issue? You're presenting to your boss, you're presenting to the board, you're presenting to a colleague, that matters. What are your concerns? What problem are you trying to solve? And then standards, what would good look like? So those four things, just give us a shortcut to say how do we avoid the bypass and how do we ask good questions so that we build trust instead of creating distrust.

Melanie Avalon:
the power dynamic in that, would that also be like giving the freedom to ask questions and things like that?

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, absolutely. Your statement of, please ask me questions, that's a good start because it gives them permission because inside most hierarchies, what leaders don't realize is how much power their direct reports or the people that work with them and for them, how much power those folks give your word. So, Melanie says, X, they're internal. Most people, not all, because some are more awake and aware, but most people will go, okay, Ellie, what's that? I'm just going to go churn it out, right? By you saying, please ask questions, gives them permission to not fall into that trap, right? Now, one step further would be share with them, okay, here are the four things that we should be, make sure you understand what am I trying to accomplish, the things I just went through a minute ago. That would be then a blueprint for them to ask questions because guess what? If you know from my book, you know these four things, you know that questions are so powerful and how to ask good questions, they don't. So now you get to educate them. Yes.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, I love that. And question also about the hierarchy thing. I'm just so fascinated by all of it. Cause you said in one point in the book, it might've been like the last sentence. There's one point you're like, the takeaway is. Which I always love those sentences cause they're really helpful. But you say something about, you know, make requests, not demands and something. And we haven't talked yet about the difference between what requests versus demands look like. But I've even noticed for me, I actually had a conversation about this the other day with somebody on my team. But even for me, so even if I'm in the hierarchy, like the person making the decisions, even still, and I'm curious your thoughts on this, I will never, even if I'm like paying somebody to do something for me, I never, it bothers me if I ever were to just tell them what to do. Even if they're like being paid to do it. Like I always ask them if they would do something. Like always, to a fault. But then I reflect on that though and I'm like, is that being too much of not, I don't know. I struggle, I guess I struggle with my role of where I see myself in a hierarchy and how I interact with other people. So I'm really interested in this like request versus demand concept.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so yeah, the dilemma you're having is a distinction that that that we can make that So that look the authority issue is sort of the root of this problem, right? If you are the boss you have a responsibility and if they are working for you, they have a responsibility You're signing their check That sounds crude but you know You know so but then as the boss If you default so, okay, one extreme is demand. Just go get this damn thing done, right? And you know, there are bosses that behave that way. Here's what I want. Go do it. Shut up. Don't talk to me, right? On the other hand on the other extreme is could you would you please help me maybe do this? right And that's a weak request The other is a demand and the other and the the the obnoxious one has a demand And the other is a weak request. All right Finding that middle ground where you have responsibility and you but you are And they have a responsibility to to follow your lead You have a responsibility To you can make a clear request and at the same time give them permission to say no So a request without a possible no is a demand

Speaker 3
What would that?

Chuck Wisner:
look like.

Melanie Avalon:
Me too. I was like, highlight.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, so that that looks like sort of the road you started going down earlier to say ask me questions So a request any promise starts only starts in two ways By someone makes a request. Will you do x? Or someone makes an offer i'd like to do y for you Okay, so those that's the root of everything In the commitment conversation now the request or the offer is received by someone. There's a receiver, right? Who's not a radio transmitter because they're They're trying to figure out the powers you use and what you want and what they want and what they think and what you think and all that jazz So they are the receiver And if they're doing an automatic, yes Right Then you're probably going to not have a satisfactory promise or a promise it Holds up very well So I say when we take this conversation apart To avoid those issues to avoid the automatic. Yes, or sure. I can do that for you We I ask people to make ask questions to get a clarification to understand the request Because every request has four or five or six elements Who's it for? Why is it important? What problem are we trying to solve? What does good look like? What's the timing? So those are all elements are there that are typical for any request whether it's Me asking my wife to help me do something or A boss, you know telling someone else to do something So the clarification is giving people people permission To make sure they understand their request as fully as possible So they have the best chance of fulfilling it And when we fulfill every promise we fulfill builds trust every promise we don't fulfill creates distrust. So for you First of all make a strong request or make don't be hesitant about your request But make a request and say here's what i'd like and even if they Aren't asking questions Then you have responsibility say Here's what i'm trying to accomplish. Here's what good looks like. Here's who it's for This is what timing works for me and guess what instead of yes The option that we don't use is a counter offer So if you made that request to me And I heard all those elements that you said here's what I want. Blah, blah, blah, blah. I say, you know What that all makes a lot of sense I can't get it to you tomorrow, but I can tomorrow morning, but I can get it to you tomorrow afternoon That's a counter offer. That's meaning saying one of those elements. I can't satisfy or I might say Yeah, I can do that. But will you ask for bullet points? My experience is if we had a picture and three lines or Three sentence one sentence in every slide that would be more effective I can counter and say maybe that would be a better way to do it And then you could say yes, no, maybe whatever to me That that is what I call clarification and counter offer so we can build the best promise possible

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, so we should encourage that, the counter offers and the clarifications and the questions.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, absolutely. I think for a lot of leaders, they have to realize that default for the receiver or just fear of asking questions or fear of counter -offering. You have to create that psychological safety. Now, creating psychological safety, being clear on your request, is really different than making a man -be -pan -be request.

Melanie Avalon:
How do you feel about the use of emojis, like when they're text -based? I use a lot of emojis.

Chuck Wisner:
I actually like them. I think the interesting thing about text and whether it's text or other social media stuff, because we're not having a face -to -face conversation or even a conversation like you and I are having audio without being together, is the emotional element, the emotion of the voice, the physicality of the body, what's the body projecting, what's the voice projecting because our bodies don't lie. Emojis are a way of trying to introduce like saying something and then a smiley face says, I'm not mad, I'm happy, or could you help me and here's what I want and you do something or they do a thumbs up back. I think probably be careful, but lean on the side of it. What you're trying to do is increase the emotional connection, the emotional understanding, the head -to -head and heart -to -heart alignment. If you overdo it, then you're creating some confusion.

Melanie Avalon:
I tend to saturate my written conversations with emojis, and it's not to be like crazy. It's because I feel like it's what you just said. I need to communicate all of these non -verbals that can't be communicated through text, so I try to communicate that with emojis.

Chuck Wisner:
It's fun to just be careful that you're not sending me signals that make sense.

Melanie Avalon:
question about the requests versus the offer. There's sometimes when I'm actually not sure if it's a request or an offer. And the example I'm thinking of is like with this show, for example, sometimes I'll reach out to like very, you know, renowned types of people. And so like inviting them onto the show, I don't know if that's actually a request or an offer because it looks like an offer because I'm like, here's an invitation to my podcast. But really, it's also a request.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah. Okay. So, the distinction is this. You are requesting they do something for you. You are not offering – here's your confusion, because you think, well, but I'm offering to do something for them, right?

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah kind of relates to the hierarchy because it's like if it were somebody I don't even like using this. I don't see I I clearly struggle emotionally with hierarchies and like

Chuck Wisner:
Someone whose voice or whose experience you don't give as much authority to as someone else It's an authority issue, right? Yeah, so so then you you you switch from Requesting I'd love to have you on my show Is there even though it's you're offering them something your request you're giving them permission to say yes, no, maybe So, you know, I'd say mostly it's a request you probably get twisted around your own head When it's someone that you give their voice more authority, right? But then if you think of it as an offer that might affect how you your words that you use and it might be less Could you would you please come on my podcast?

Melanie Avalon:
Well, it's interesting because I feel like in a way, because going back to the hierarchy issue, it feels like if I'm on a hierarchy totem pole, if it's somebody above me, then I feel like technically that's probably more a request. But if it was somebody, I don't even like this term, but like below me, then that would be an offer because my show would really help them. So it's like when I pitch people that are like way up there, even though it's a request, I feel like I have to make it look like an offer to like raise myself up on the totem pole, which is starting to feel a little bit Machiavellian, which is not my intention. So here's.

Chuck Wisner:
Here's a little way around that, because I can see how you get confused about that. You can make a request, and then you can also make a distinction about why your podcast would be particularly good for them. That's your offer is, if you come on my show, I'm offering you to come on my show because there's a benefit to you. You don't want to do that in an arrogant way, but you invite, and then you say, here's what I do, here's my audience, here's why we'd love to have you. That way, you're taking care of both thoughts that you have.

Melanie Avalon:
It's just so interesting. And it's another example of, again, something where I wasn't even really aware of these concepts. And now, now I see it all the time, like when I'm sending, you know, pitch emails and stuff. Which, by the way, if the audience is curious, it's a complete wildcard. I have no idea when I send these. If people are going to risk it. Who's going to? Yeah. And sometimes it completely blows my mind, which is awesome.

Chuck Wisner:
The idea that you now have the distinction about the things we're talking about, I just want to tell a little story about one of my teachers, and this really stuck for me, and this is when I was studying the language. He said, if you and I go to Alaska, and we spend six months with the Inuit indigenous people, they have some 25, 30 names for snow. If we learned those 25 words for snow, why they have those distinctions, what snow is good for igloo building, what snow is good for this, what snow is good for that, and why they hold for sledding, for whatever the distinctions are, they have reasons and they have those names. When we went back to New England, you would never see snow the same way again. In some ways, these language distinctions about the conversations and about the tools inside the conversations are giving us distinctions and words and names so that we can't be in conversation as innocently, which on one hand can be really scary, but on the other hand, it's a wake -up call.

Melanie Avalon:
I love it. One of my favorite, I don't know what the word would be, something that we, you would probably know the word for this. So what is it called when it's something that we do in conversation? I'll just tell you what it is. Maybe, maybe you know the word. So it's aposiopesis, which is basically it's the dot, dot, dot. So like when you are writing it, it's like when you break off in thought and it looks like dot, dot, dot. So when you do, I mean, that's aposeio pieces, but we do it also when we're talking. So like if I start talking and then I, that would have been aposiopesis just then. Like I didn't finish my thoughts. Once I had the word for that, then you see it everywhere. I don't know what the word is though. What is the word for when you, these tools and techniques and things that we do in language?

Chuck Wisner:
the word that I use is just the distinctions. They're distinctions that we don't have otherwise. Without those names for snow, we don't have those names, so we can't make a distinction between one snow and another snow. Without the names of different conversations or the power of advocacy and the power of inquiry and the power of authority, we don't have those words and those names, so we can't see it. We literally are an autopilot in our conversations. When you have the distinction, when you have the word, and then you practice, it changes everything. You hear differently, you process your own thinking differently, and you speak differently. That's the key, and that's why it's a practice because there's no and you're going to have success and you're going to have failures, so we just keep working it. Then you might get a new distinction. That's the word I use. I don't know if there's another or not.

Melanie Avalon:
The person who introduced me to that, his name is Raymond Moody. I keep meaning to have him on the show. He came up with the idea, he popularized the idea of when you, near death experiences, he did a lot of work on that, but he has a book he wrote and it's literally just all these different things and conversations and language. It's on my shelf over there. That's where I learned about aposiopesis. So when these promises and these commitments do break down, which I think we experience a lot. So, and you, and by the way, listeners, friends, definitely if, well, either way, I was going to say, if you're enjoying this either way, get the book, The Art of Conscious Conversations, because all of this is in there in great detail and every chapter has all of these practices that you can actually do. So, you know, actually implementing this into your life and learning these techniques, it's all in there. So get the book now.

Chuck Wisner:
Thank you, and by the way, thanks for reading it so thoroughly. Not everyone that I'm on a podcast with does such a thorough job as you did.

Melanie Avalon:
No, of course, no. Thank you. I, like I said, I just love reading stuff like this because I love learning it and I'm so appreciative and grateful because like you were just saying, if we don't have this information and knowledge, if we don't know it, we're never going to see it. So I literally rely on reading books like this to learn. So when things do break down and you have a lot in the book about this that's really, really helpful, I guess there's, you know, when we're the issue or when the other person is the issue. I mean, the idea of complaints, for example, I am not, they make me feel, going back to how I feel about things, I really don't like complaining, like I really don't like it. I had to do it the other day about something and I realized I had to do it because it was just so wrong, like the fulfillment of promises that were made. So how can we in a healthy way approach, you call it, I think, the humble complaint, how can we approach that?

Chuck Wisner:
It goes back to the root of making sloppy promises or quick promises. If you really understand what they're made of, and obviously, I would say the failure of your worker or whoever was doing this for you that didn't succeed.

Melanie Avalon:
It's a transportation driver issue to the airport.

Chuck Wisner:
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So, there was a misunderstanding, right? And I think that what you have to do is fall back on, okay, what are promises made of? They're made of requests. They're made of offers. They're made of clarity of standards, clarity of expectations, and all those things. So, then an honorable complaint or a humble complaint says, you know, I believe that we had an agreement that X would happen, X didn't happen. For me, the damage is X because I talk about what's the damage, what's the consequence. And of course, depending on the situation, there might be a way to take care of the damages and there might not be. But the conversation is almost like instead of diving into you screwed up and you didn't know what I asked you to do, you say, wow, so we had a misunderstanding. Here's what I was thinking. Here's what happened. And then wait and see if they're aligned with you because they might say, you never told me to take that left or you never told me you wanted to do X, Y, and Z. And then you have to reconsider, well, is this a complaint or was this a really bad promise?

Melanie Avalon:
It was helpful in my situation because everything had been written down beforehand about what was promised, like in an email. So like the price was wrong, the pickup time was wrong, the drop off was wrong. But even like in that email I sent, this is me going again wondering how much, like how much it's just okay to just make the complaint versus cushion it. So I felt the need to say like, I don't normally complain. And I'm mostly saying this so that you can help future people better. But like is I don't know, did I even need to add that in? Like should I just have been gone straight to like how cold should the complaint be?

Chuck Wisner:
So was this all done by it was a complaint done by email or a person?

Melanie Avalon:
It was through email because it was basically somebody at the hotel organizing the ride and then the deliverable of the ride did not match.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, okay. In that case, I would say, generally, what you're doing as a complaint is if you don't tell them of a problem, you're doing them a disservice. Because if they're really serious about good service and they don't allow people to give them bad news, then they're not serious about good service. If they're serious about good service and you have a legitimate complaint, you're doing them a service by telling them. That's a different way to frame it in your own head. You can actually begin that way. I believe we had an agreement in the email below. Just so you know, in the name of good service, these are the things that broke down for me. And I'm telling you because if perhaps you have a reason, and I'd be happy to hear the reason if there's a misunderstanding, but also this is information for you, this is feedback for you, so you can do better the next time.

Melanie Avalon:
awesome. I feel like that's mostly where I landed with the email.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, and you also want to pay attention to their response because their response might tell you whether you ever want to hire them again So see if you if you have a good complaint and they acknowledge their mistake You can start all over and rebuild trust if you make a complaint and they don't respond in a way that they take Responsibility or they have a they have an answer that says no we weren't wrong. You were wrong Then that's where we then said well, I'll never hire them again, or I can't trust them, right? So that's that that happens very easily. So that's why a Good complaint is important to say let's rebuild. Let's start over and let's both understand what the concept what the problem was What the broken promise was and what the consequences were so we can Do that better the next time because it's all about can we do it better tomorrow?

Melanie Avalon:
That actually relates to a big overarching question I have, which is because like in that example, right there, you know, you are doing your work on your side of the conversation and submitting the complaint with all of these factors that you just spoke about, and then it's up to them to see how they respond back. So with conversations in general, so we individually can work on all of these, you know, techniques and ways that we're engaging with conversations and everything. And still at the end of the day, a conversation is two people. So how much optimization can we do with conversations since it's always going to be two people? Like how many glass ceilings are there?

Chuck Wisner:
Well, first of all, I'm not sure I understand because there's always two people. A meeting of 10 people is a conversation as well.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh, okay. Sorry. Yes. So, you know, you can do all of this right quote, right? And the person might just not be listening. So it's like, how do we navigate that?

Chuck Wisner:
So the analogy I like is, or as a metaphor I like, is that if we're doing this work, we're coming into a conversation with an open hand. In other words, I think this is in the book, but, you know, generally people come into a conversation with their minds made up and their perspective, you know, clear. That's sort of like going into a conversation with a fist, right? And then you come in with a fist, I come in with a fist, and sooner or later we're going at each other. With this work and with the four questions about power and desires and standards and those, that's like opening your hand. So instead of going into a conversation with a fist, you can say, I have a perspective, but here's why I think this way. These are the standards that I hold. This is what I think, you know, I recognize you're the boss and it's your final decision, but I have some concerns that I'd like to talk to you about because I think it's good for us to know, and here's what I'd like. So in other words, we start opening our hand. It's a humbling and it's also a vulnerable, more vulnerable way to be in conversations. Now, if we want to be vulnerable, there's a couple things that happen that can be contagious and other people, you know, it's almost like we're opening our hearts, so they sort of can open their heart a little bit or open their fist a little bit, or we can ask them questions that pry their fist. We ask good questions like, I understand we disagree, but what are you concerned about? We ask them a good question and we sort of pry their hand open, right? Then we can start having a collaborative learning, mutual learning, mutual respect, tolerant conversation. If we run into someone and we are being vulnerable and humble and opening our heart and mind and they don't want to, it's perfectly acceptable to not engage or to engage in a very limited way because that's when we take care of ourselves. Now, the other side of that conversation is when people throw poison or toxic judgments and things to us, I don't even know if you're familiar with Miguel Ruiz's book, The Four Agreement.

Speaker 3
Yes, yes. I need to reread that. It's been a long time.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, I studied with Miguel before he became a popular fellow, but it's like don't take anything personally as one of the four agreements. Someone's coming to us with toxicity. We have some options recognizing that it's their story. They might even be talking about us, but it's still their story with their thinking and their beliefs and their standards and their issues around power. We have a choice. We either, without awareness, we let that toxicity in. It seeps into our bones and our heart and our mind, right? Then we're hurt or frustrated or we're angry or whatever emotion gets created. The trick is to learn to catch toxicity before it enters. Then if you catch it, I think an image might be like a poison dart coming at you. Instead of letting it in, you catch it. Then from there, you decide, hmm, do I want anything to do with this? If you respect the person and you feel respected by then, you can enter and say, you know what? That was hurtful, but I'd love to know why you think that way. You can engage in a conversation. Other times it's coming and you recognize that they're not being intolerant, they're not open, they're very close, they're very angry. Don't just give it back and say, hey, whether it's yours. I don't want that. I don't need that in mind. I don't need that energy. The third option is you just throw it to the gods, which basically you just walk away. You don't engage at all. That's a real practice.

Speaker 3
lots of options. Oh, man, I love it.

Melanie Avalon:
love this well. Oh my goodness. I think, okay, we touched on a lot of things. Was there anything else you wanted to draw attention to for listeners? And again, I refer them to the book because it's all in there and I really think it will better a lot of people's lives. So people get it.

Speaker 3
now.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah. And I'd say every reader, if they choose to read the book, have to do it at their own pace. The book is really dense. And so you don't have to swallow it, eat the whole enchilada. You take it chapter by chapter and practice by practice. And I think in the end, I think the real art of A, understanding our stories and increasing our consciousness and our awareness is really how we then can engage with other people in a new way, in a new open, vulnerable, humble way. And then that leads to us being more creative. And then that leads to us making better commitments and promises. So they're all connected, but it all starts at home. And that's probably why the first 60 pages of the book are about stories.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, that's coming back to me now, how with each of the conversations, you talk about how this one is actually a prerequisite, you know, to the next type of conversation. It's not like they, you can just have them all siloed. Right, right.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, they're connected, and it's good to take them apart and understand them, but then you start seeing how interwoven they are.

Melanie Avalon:
I appreciated this so, so much. So how can people best get the book, follow your work, all of the things?

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah. So obviously it's on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and all that jazz. They can ask their local bookstore to order it, which would be really cool for me. But it's on Amazon. There's a Kindle version. So that's how they can get the book. I do tapping into social media a bit. I haven't been there a long time, but tapping in. And so on Instagram, I'm Chuck underscore Wisner. And Facebook is coming along, but I'm pretty sloppy with it. And in fact, my Instagram has been everything has been frozen for three weeks because I got my financials got hacked.

Speaker 3
Oh

Melanie Avalon:
Oh no, I got hacked too. Not my financial, one of my accounts got hacked. It's the worst.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, it's taking a while to, it's a real pain.

Speaker 3
Did you get in touch with somebody at Instagram about this?

Chuck Wisner:
Well, actually, meta is who you have to work with.

Melanie Avalon:
Did you get in touch with somebody at Meta because it's been, it's been like a year for me and I haven't been able to fix mine and it's horrible.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, you know what I had to I someone that did social media for me a year ago, she's helping me out because it's so complex to navigate, I needed to get help. So you might need to ask someone that can navigate that world. It's like talking to a wall. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think we're working through it. But anyway, I'm still there on Instagram. And I'm in LinkedIn. And you know, people should feel free to you know, my website is Chuck Wissner calm. I think on the website, you can download a free first chapter or the introduction. I can't do remember which it is. I don't have the book in front of me.

Melanie Avalon:
I don't know because they sent me the PDF.

Chuck Wisner:
So there is a free introduction or first chapter so feel free to do that and then also don't hesitate to reach out and ask me questions or connect somehow.

Speaker 3
Awesome. Do you narrate the audiobook?

Chuck Wisner:
I do not. I hired someone because I have friends that did their own book and it was... It's a process. It's a lot harder than it sounds, yeah.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh, yes, I used to do audiobooks.

Speaker 3
and they take a long.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, yeah. And it's, you know, many takes and many, you know, all that kind of stuff. So I listened to four or five voices and chose one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but it's there. And I now have four, three translations I have. So funny, I have Arabic, Turkish, and Taiwanese. So my book is being translated in those languages, which is not what I would have expected. And that's not, I mean, I'm not, people have to find the book and they have to request, they have to make an agreement with my publisher to interpret it and make their own publication. But it's not what I expected, but that part of the world could use the book. So I'm happy that it's there.

Melanie Avalon:
It's funny that happened with me with my book and it was like the most random country. I don't even remember now.

Speaker 3
they're like they want the rights there it's like okay it was like so I think was like check or something it was like yeah it's funny how that happens

Chuck Wisner:
Somebody finds it and they love it and so they say, let me, I want to publish it. So yeah, out of our control.

Melanie Avalon:
I know. So the last question that I ask every single guest on this show and it's just because I realize more and more and more each day how important mindset is. So what is something that you're grateful for?

Chuck Wisner:
Well, right now I have to say my health, my well -being, I've had multiple medical scares and luckily here I am healthy and happy and wise. And so I was diagnosed with leukemia many years ago and I've had some, I have a genetic heart disease. So all of that, these are all wake -up calls, you know, in some way, not in some way they are. And so those are all, they're things I live with but they haven't stopped me from living. So I'm really grateful that I'm that blessed.

Melanie Avalon:
Thank you for sharing that. And yeah, I wish you the best with that. I mean, so much of this show is the majority of this show, the episodes are, you know, health and wellness related. And I just think it's, it's so important. And I think we don't realize the importance of our vitality until we have moments like that, that threaten it. So

Chuck Wisner:
And now we respond to it, you know, it's really crucial. That's a whole nother conversation.

Speaker 3
I know.

Melanie Avalon:
I know. Oh my goodness. Well, thank you so much, Chuck. This has been so incredible. I really can't thank you enough for your work and what you're doing. And I just hope all the listeners get the book and read it and start, you know, working on all these practices and

Speaker 3
implementing them into our conversation so we can have more conscious conversations.

Chuck Wisner:
Yeah, great. Well, I hope you get great feedback. Let me know and we'll be in touch. Thank you so much for having me, for inviting me, for offering me to be on your show.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh, I love that. No, this has been absolutely amazing. So thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Speaker 3
Thank you. Bye. Bye.