The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 419 - Thinking Out Loud

Transcript:

Pete: Hello, Jen.

Jen: Hello, Peter.

Pete: I want to talk to you about something you and I do every single time we record this podcast.

Jen: Have no ideas?

Pete: Yes, yes. That and what we do as a result of that, which is we think out loud.

Jen: We do.

Pete: And I feel like the permission we have with one another to think out loud is rarer than I give it credit for.

Jen: I think you're right about that. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: Okay. So, how I got here. I have just finished running a bunch more workshops. I should have counted. I must have run over a hundred and something workshops, at this point in time this year. And they're about various topics, all about, you know, helping leaders be more effective in the way they lead. And a lot of activities or a lot of reflections that I get back at the end from people are consistent. And they don't say it this way, but I observe it this way. Which is, "Man, it's rare for people to have space, permission, time, and the opportunity to think out loud with other people." Especially in the world that I'm working in, which is, you know, like the corporates of the world that are so busy, so overwhelmed, so oftentimes senior and stressed, that they carry so much on their own and they don't have the time, the permission, the capability or whatever it is, the opportunity to think out loud, like to do what I'm doing right now. And so, so much of the philosophy of the way I run the workshops that I run is to create that space. That my assertion is most people that attend a workshop facilitated by Pete will get something out of it because of the conversation they had with the other person, not because of something I said. And so, I've been thinking a lot about this. How might we, anyone listening, create more space for ourselves to think out loud? I've been thinking more about how you and I do this. And I was like, "Oh, I guess we do this every week in the podcast." And then, the other angle that I've been thinking about...this is slightly more whimsical. My son is three, and he literally thinks out loud all the time. He will be sitting there playing with his cars and he will just be saying the exact thing that's on his brain, to himself or to me. And I absolutely love it. I adore it. It's hilarious. But I'm also like, it's probably him processing the world and making sense of the world at the same time. Surely, we could all be doing more of this.

Jen: And he hasn't learned yet from any social cues that it would be "right" for him to do that in his head with his inside voice.

Pete: Right. Classic example: Grandma and Grandpa are coming to visit, and Ollie will say something like, "You don't have to say hi to Grandma." He will literally say that out loud. And I'm like, "No. I mean, you know, it might be nice to say hi, but if you're not feeling comfortable and you don't want to say hi, you don't have to say hi immediately." But like, classic example of that's the thing that comes through his head. Like, "Oh, I might be a bit scared to say hello at the start. But I'm not going to internalize that. I'm just going to verbalize that." And of course, within five minutes, him and Grandma are best mates and they're reading books on the couch. And then, you know, he's jumping up and down. But it's like the thing that he says immediately out loud, to your point, is usually the thing that people think in their heads now, when you get older.

Jen: Wow. Oh, I love that age. It's so special.

Pete: It's so funny.

Jen: Okay, well, I've got a million bajillion things to say about this, Pete.

Pete: Okay, great. Let's think out loud about thinking out loud.

Jen: I am an out loud thinker. That's just the way I work.

Pete: You are actually even more than me.

Jen: I mean, I can think in my head. And actually, some people might say that I don't say enough in certain situations. However, if I'm trying to process something, my better option (when it is available to me) is to just say the things I'm thinking. And this is just for me, not everybody's like this. Versus, me opening a Google Doc and trying to type out my thoughts. Or versus, me grabbing a pen and a paper. Now, other people are amazing with pen and paper, or with their Google Docs. For me, if I just talk about it, I solve it. I like crack the thing I'm trying to work on.

Pete: You do. I've seen you do this so many times. I feel like I identify more with like, I need a notepad and pen. I'm literally doing it right now, while we record every episode. I scribble all these things down, most of them which I don't even use. But it's my way of...I don't even know if that counts. I guess it's thinking out loud on paper. But then, I'm also like, "But we do it in the podcast." So, I guess I can do it in some capacity. But nowhere near to the level of you. I've always admired and been curious about your ability to just talk about the thing. And then, all of a sudden, you'll solve it. I'm like, I think I write.

Jen: Well, I've got to say that I used to think that was not the right way to think. Maybe having technology available now that supports thinkers like me has made it acceptable to be an out loud thinker. I talk into my Otter app. If you go back and read my blog posts, for example, I transcribed those. Those were voice memos. Those were not me sitting down and going like, "What are the beautiful words?" Because none of it is beautiful. "What are the beautiful words I want to say?"

Pete: Yeah. And by the way, that's why your blog posts sound so much like you. Because they are literally you. That's one of your superpowers, is the writing that I read of yours sounds like I'm having a conversation with Jen. And it's because, I guess, I literally was. You talked to me.

Jen: Right. Well, okay. So what's funny about this idea of writing versus talking, I've got a bunch of clients who have been trying to write more. And I'm not talking about creative writing. I'm talking about correspondence. And they'll send me a draft of something, and I'm like, "This sounds sanitized. This sounds clinical. Like, it doesn't sound like you at all." And I'll get on a call with them and go, "What are you actually trying to say? Like, what do you mean?" And then, they'll say to me exactly what should be on the page.

Pete: Right. Interesting. That, for some people, the process of writing takes their voice away. Yeah, I get that. I mean, I see that a lot even now, with people relying on AI tools to do more writing. It's like, I mentioned this on a podcast a while back, Seth Godin's blog post that talks about how Grammarly and other AI tools take everyone's writing to be the same. They take you back to the average. And that the little idiosyncrasies, the little quirks, the little different ways of using punctuation or certain words that, whilst not grammatically perfect or correct, are actually the thing that make it sound like you, the human, should stay, not disappear. And they're the things that, in audio, in talking, that you keep.

Jen: That's right.

Pete: Huh. Curious.

Jen: It's so funny. The other thing that I hear you talking about in relationship to your clients is a container of permission for people to think out loud. Because when you're thinking out loud, you're freeform. You're not editing. You're not necessarily picking the right words or saying the right thing. And if you are working within a container that only allows edited perfection to exist, it's nearly impossible to feel free to think out loud.

Pete: It's such a good point. And I feel torn about this. In one hand, I know that is true for a lot of people. That they actually, in a work context, for example, they don't feel like they can think out loud because of maybe past experiences, or maybe something that their manager literally did or said, or someone that's taken something they said one time and used it against them. That is real. And I also feel like some of this is self-inflicted. That we, whether it's perfectionism or whether it's the wanting to feel like we have it together of it all, we think that everything we say has to be thought through, polished, finished, rather than, "I don't know. Let me think about this for a second out loud." Like, I don't know. I feel like part of it is permission to self. Part of it, I'm sure, is in certain contexts, people don't actually feel like they or don't actually have permission.

Jen: But it's amazing, Pete, how powerful a phrase like, "I'm just thinking out loud here," how far that can take a conversation.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: Not because other people would have thought it was your finished thought, but because you (I'm talking to the general you, not you specifically, Pete) are afraid that people will think it's your finished thought.

Pete: Right.

Jen: So just adding that at the beginning, like, "Let me just spitball here for a second. Alright? This is just me thinking out loud," takes all the pressure off of it being fully cooked.

Pete: Or like, something we've talked about before, "Can we just get some crappy ideas out first? I need to just get some shitty first draft out first." Name the thing, so that it takes away the expectation of it having to be polished, for yourself but also for the other person. This is slightly adjacent, but it reminds me of...I often use this and think about this example that most people can relate to. When you're in an audience and someone has to give a speech or a talk or a presentation, and they say something like, "I hate public speaking so much. I'm really nervous," at the start. And people don't lean back and go, "I hope you fail. You suck." If someone says that, "I'm really nervous. I don't like public speaking," you immediately lean in and you're like, "Oh my god, me too. Let's go. You got this. We're here. You might be nervous, but it's going to be okay." Like, you don't root for them to fail. You lean in and want them to succeed. And I feel like it's a version of that, of like, "Can I just think out loud about this?" The other person is like, "Oh, yeah, we could think out loud about this. That would be fun." It's not like, "I hope you think out loud and your ideas suck." No one thinks that.

Jen: You know, Pete, there are a bunch of authors whose work I follow in the nonfiction realm. And a lot of their books have come out of them publicly thinking unfinished thoughts. And it's amazing to witness. I'm thinking of some people specifically, but I'll just name one because I've been following this, because it relates to me at this phase in life. Gretchen Rubin, who has written lots of books that I love and has amazing frameworks, was thinking out loud for the last two years on her podcast, about her experiences sending her daughters off to college. And she was like, she didn't like the term "empty nest". So, she was like workshopping other ways to talk about it. And she came up with "open door". Well, she's about to release her Open Door book, which is a product of her thinking out loud, and then, talking to other people and hearing them think out loud. And now, she's publishing a book about this. If she hadn't been working through various ways to frame this time of life, who knows if that book would exist?

Pete: That is so good. I love that. What a great example. It feels like that reminder that ideas aren't zero sum. That you don't have to hold onto your idea because of fear that if you release it into the world, it will no longer be yours, it'll be gone. If I have an idea and you have an idea, and we both share our idea out loud, now we both have two ideas. It's not that we still only have one, or I give you mine and now you've got two and I've got zero. It's like, no, we both have two ideas now. So, ideas aren't zero sum. It's good to get them out loud, that helps you shape them, and build them, and refine them, and improve them. And maybe you'll say something, and someone will reflect back to you, "That's actually a really good idea." And you go, "Really? I never thought about that before." I feel like that's every episode of our podcast. So often, I'm like, "Well, I don't think that was an idea or an episode." And we turn it into episode, and someone sends us an email and goes, "That was really interesting and useful for these five reasons." And you're like, "Wow, I never thought about it that way."

Jen: Yeah. I was down at Taylor Swift rabbit hole the other night. And I was rewatching her acceptance speech at the iHeartRadio Awards, where she won Innovator of the Year. And this was a couple of years ago. And she gives this speech, where she's like, "You have to give yourself permission to have bad ideas. You have to give yourself permission to fail. The number of bad ideas I've had that have led me to the good ideas...". I mean, I'm paraphrasing. And then, she says, "Because if you give yourself enough permission to have your bad ideas, someday, someone might call you an innovator." Just such a great, you know, punchline at the end. But it's like, it's so true.

Pete: That is so good. It's so true. Have bad ideas, yeah.

Jen: And then, another angle on this is like the leadership angle, which I know you deal with on the daily. Leaders have to model the behavior they wish to see. And this is part of building the container where people feel the freedom to think out loud. So, I don't know, when you were saying earlier like, "Give me your worst ideas." Well, maybe the person who is setting that up also needs to contribute some.

Pete: Very true. I mean, I've been on this soapbox and rant for a while. But I've been more explicit about it recently, with a bunch of leaders I'm coaching. I literally said to a CEO yesterday, "If I could have every leadership team struggling with collaboration do one thing, this is what I would have them do. I would have them, once a week, have a sixty-minute meeting, where they sit down and take turns for ten minutes each. If there's five people in the leadership team, great, you can all have a turn. If there's ten, five people go and five can go the week after. You each get ten minutes to say, 'This is the thing I'm really struggling on or with. This is the challenge I have.' And the other nine of you, the other five of you, the other four of you, whatever, just ask questions and give the other person ideas for ten minutes. At the end of the ten minutes, we move on to the next person and we go around. Sometimes, the problem will get solved. Most of the time, a next step will come out of it. All of the time, everyone in that room will understand way more about the other person's world, priorities, struggles. And that will build more trust, more collaboration, more psychological safety, and more permission to think out loud."

Jen: That is so good.

Pete: And I think you're right, though, about the leader modeling that behavior. And I guess the other thing is, it can't always be thinking out loud all the time. And this is why the ten-minute thing works. At the end of that ten minutes, you, the leader, have to go, "Okay, I will take this away and do with it what I do with it. I will make a decision, based on that information. And that is the decision I will own." At some point, you need to walk away from the thinking out loud and turn it into an action or a strategy or an idea.

Jen: Right.

Pete: But I feel like the lack of permission to think out loud gets in the way of us coming up with better ideas.

Jen: So very true. Okay, one more thought from me, Pete. Which is, if you are someone who does not typically think out loud, you've got to expect that you're not going to be great at it at first.

Pete: Right.

Jen: And I realize you and I are talking about like, "This is how we work. This is how we think, because we've been practicing it for so long every day." But I just want to like throw it out there to the listeners who are like, "I couldn't possibly, because I won't be good at it." Correct. Out of the gate, you might feel weird even saying what you're thinking out loud. But keep going, because something amazing happens. Just pay attention to this for like an hour. When we breathe, we take the exact amount of air that it takes to ride the full thought out of ourselves, but we don't consciously know what the thought is yet. Isn't that wild? Like when we're talking, I'm not thinking about how much breath I'm taking. And at the end of a sentence, I'm not running out of breath because I didn't take enough breath. I'm taking the exact amount of breath for the thought that wants to come out. But I don't even know what it is yet.

Pete: That's wild.

Jen: It's wild. So, we might know more than we think we know. And thinking out loud might help us know what we actually know. Did that make any sense? I don't know. I was thinking out loud.

Pete: I feel like you summarized every single professional development book ever written, which is: You are capable of more than you realize.

Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.