EQ, AI, and the Influential Communicator - with Deirdre Breakenridge

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Dan Nestle: Welcome, or welcome back to the trending communicator. I'm your host, Dan Nestle. Now, I was at a conference last week about AI, of course, and one of the sessions was a panel discussion about AI adoption in organizations. Now that's kind of my bread and butter these days. So I wanted to get some new information, something I could sink my teeth into. And it was useful to hear what some companies are up to. But the key insight I took away wasn't really about process or training or compliance. I asked the panel if they saw the potential of AI, and more specifically, the way AI can expand and enhance the comms remit to raise the profile of the comms team within the organization. And one of the panelists, a senior comms exec from Mars, the company, not the planet, rightly reframed the question through his answer.

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Dan Nestle: He said that it's not our job to get recognition or to boost our own internal brand. It's our job to advise and to counsel and to build trust and credibility within the organization and raise the profile of the company, not our team. So it wasn't really an AI answer, which was great, but it was a great reminder of our purpose. He was thinking of stakeholders, of service. He was really talking about influence. And I mention this because our ability to influence others by properly doing our job, of course, but also by building relationships and being honest brokers is always a hot topic in the industry. We can't lose sight of doing it right, regardless of AI or any other changes we're coping with, it might be one of those things that's AI immune, in fact, moving into the future.

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Dan Nestle: Look, I still contend that AI presents a huge opportunity for us to better advisors, expand our remit, consequently wield influence. But I think my guest today can shed far more light on the topic than I can. A marketing PR strategist, speaker, podcaster, teacher, and author and trainer, she's done more than most to influence the communications profession. The author of seven books, including answers for ethical marketers, answers for modern communicators, putting the public back in public relations, PR 2.0, and more. She's the CEO of strategic communications firm Pure Performance and co host of the weekly LinkedIn live DM show. No stranger to technology, she's developed and delivered training courses on leadership and influence online, and recently developed an AI tool to identify emotions based on facial analysis. And I'd love to hear a little bit more about that.

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Dan Nestle: She is a trending communicator, an influential communicator, as it were. Please welcome to the show for the second time, actually, when you think about it. Deirdre Breckenridge, thank you. Thank you.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: I'm doing well. It's great to be back.

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Dan Nestle: I know. It's great to be back. I was just, you know, before we hit the button, I was reminiscing a little bit with Deirdre about, you know, the last time she was on, which was episode 30 or 31 of the original Dan Essel show. Lot's changed since then. I believe were stuck inside and masking at the time. You know, it's like, it's a very different world. And, you know, back then, Deirdre is working on or kind of putting out there in the marketplace the feel model. And some of you might remember feel. And I'm going to go back to my notes here was face your fears, engage with empathy, live with ethics, unleash the love, feel that framework for communication with interpersonal communications, empathy and so on. And that was four years ago. Now. It still holds true.

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Dan Nestle: I think all of those things are important to keep centered in ourselves as we communicate with others and as we kind of think about how we're structuring our comms and our marketing. But clearly, Deirdre has been up to a few things in the last couple of years. So I want to, first of all, Deirdre, thanks for coming. And second of all, fill in the gap. What you been up to? What's happening? Are we still feeling the feels? How are we?

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Well, thank you for asking. First off, yes, I think we're still feeling the feels. You can't have a relationship if you don't feel. If you're in PR and communications, the relationship is everything. How do you advance conversations, communication? And I think to fill in the gaps, I would say that my feel model advanced into something that I call the influential communicator, where feel is a part of that, but it really means your ability to tune in, to align vocally, verbally, nonverbally, so that you can connect better with somebody else. So that's. I've been. I've been doing this model, and I've been doing the speaker, coaching around it, the training, lots of podcasting. I have my LinkedIn live show and all the points that you hit, Dan, and it's been great.

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Dan Nestle: It's amazing. I mean, listeners can't see, of course, but if you did, you would notice that Deirdre is ebullient when she's talking about these things. I mean, and it's not often I drop that word maybe that's the first time, but I really think that the evolution of that model and of kind of getting into what drives those relationships with one another, maybe that wouldn't have happened in such a way if it weren't for that kind of two years of darkness that we're really not going to mention here. But we've been through a lot as a society. We've been through a lot as communicators and as marketers, and we come out the other end now facing AI and facing all these other challenges.

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Dan Nestle: But I think the core of our humanity is really what Deirdre is kind of all about here and how that leads up to influence. Right. And I love the fact that you're in the training space, in the presentations and in the learning space, natural kind of progression from communications into there. And also you're contributing back to the profession and helping communicators all the time. So how are you finding this evolution of leadership and influence, let's say, in the profession? And this could be a very long discussion, but how are you finding it in the profession and in the face of the challenges we've been facing? I suppose I use space twice, but there you. Yeah.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: So in some cases it's quicker and in some it's slower. I find that communicators, as much as we are educators and learners, we're passionate. We, of course, have our soft skills and our hard skills, and we have our ethics that we live by. We often don't flow into some of the trending areas that we really need to wrap our arms around. Which you mentioned now is AI. Years ago, when I was writing several of my books, it was social media, and I could say the same thing. Why didn't the PR industry communications take the lead on it? Right. And now here we are, there's AI. We're faced with all these changes. Why don't we take the lead? And if you have the answer, Dan, I want to hear it.

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Dan Nestle: Well, you know, it's been a topic of some discussion. I mean, as I kind of alluded to in the intro there, like the question of how the comms team or comms leader or the CCO or even if it's, if you're an agency dealing with your clients, you know, how do you raise your profile? And I agree with the executive. That's probably not the right way to phrase the question. It's more about how can we lead in the areas that we know we should be leading and not from a point of view of empire building or territory grabs. It's more about what's good for our clients and what's good for the organization as we see it.

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Dan Nestle: Clearly, you don't want to be dictatorial and say, I know what's best for you, and I'm going to just do this, which is the clearest and best way to destroy influence. But how can we be more influential? Because that's really what it comes down to. If we had the influence and if were, I don't know, maybe there's an inferiority complex in the comms industry, I'm not sure. But why do we stay in our own box? Why don't we have the influence that would allow us, or kind of encourage us to be the tip of the spear for things like Aihdenkhdev? Look, just to, I know we've said this before in the show, but why should a communications team or a communications function, and let's bring marketing into it too, because marketers share the same skill sets in a lot of ways.

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Dan Nestle: Why shouldn't we take this revolutionary, we'll call it a technology, but I think it's beyond that. But this whole revolutionary thing, which is built for conversation, which works better when you can do a narrative on the fly, which is super powered, when you understand critical thinking, and I like to say interrogation, iteration, these are the things that we do. If you can string a sentence together very nicely. In other words, if you have great writing skills, you're already a leg up from just about anybody else in terms of working with this technology, which functions on language, on natural language. So all the, you know, if you check all the boxes, we should be ahead.

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Dan Nestle: But yet, you know, it seems like it's just a software tool that's being implemented by it or by the CIO or, you know, some other team in an organization is, you know, has paid the contracts or signed the contracts. So therefore they're taking care of the training, they're taking care of all the implementation. And I think it's a much bigger picture. And I think organizations are missing this big opportunity to connect dots outside of where they're currently thinking is it's a broadening effect, it's an additive effect. I'm rambling far too much. I think the key there is influence. How do we develop that?

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Well, if you want to have influence, then you can't see the opportunity with AI as someone else's job. And that is something just based on what you said. And sometimes what I see working with different companies, it is someone else's job. But it's no different than maybe what were saying back in the day with social media. Well, maybe that's somebody else's job.

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Dan Nestle: Yeah.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: I guess the heart of it is asking enough leaders. Is this a mindset issue? Is this, or are we just thinking status quo? Is it a learning curve that we just don't know how to get over some kind of a hump and we're not becoming tech testers to really see what we need to know and where we need to learn and teach our teams. Is this by industry? Is this because some of those regulated industries, it's a lot harder and they're more cautious. There's questions that need to be answered.

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Dan Nestle: I think something you're saying just made me think that there's to break down how we exert influence within the organization, because it does come down to recognizing that this isnt necessarily somebodys particular job, but we know that we have the requisite skills to really make it work wonders. And we absolutely need to partner with others to get the most out of whether its AI or anything else, but to get the most out of particular program project. I can get financial information and do financial analysis with AI, but I still want to sit down with the finance team and discuss everything with them and get a good grip of what the heck I'm looking at. Right.

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Dan Nestle: And then, you know, they would see that I'm coming in with, you know, with, from a position of, you know, partnership and desire to learn, you know, and, but there's two, like, there's these two sides to it. There's there's from the communicator or the marketer standpoint, and then there's from the executives and leadership and the other functional standpoint. And the influence and building influence has to come both ways. So I want to hear what you've got to say about how we would go about creating those relationships. Building the influence. First, maybe it's a good idea to circle back a little bit. In your words, in your mind, how would we define influence broadly? Let's start there. What, what is influence? And then how can we build it for ourselves and for our teams?

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Deirdre Breakenridge: I think the influence is your ability to move someone in the direction that you desire, an action that you'd like them to take, a way that they're going to participate with you. It could be part persuasion. There's a lot to unpack with influence, and I think Robert Cialdini is probably one of the greatest social psychologists. The book influence, everybody should check out. But within there, I think you have to take a look at yourself and some of the skills. And I do believe that you can improve your influence. Some is nature and some is nurture. So if you do want to improve your communication skills, then you'll have greater influence. Emotional intelligence plays a part of it, your authenticity. I also think your contribution score when you're speaking, how much value do you add?

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Because, Dan, what you were talking about partnering, looking at from the marketer perspective versus the executive perspective, it's the seat at the table. And when you work on your skills, you can get that seat at the table because you believe you can be there and the executives want you there.

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Dan Nestle: That part about the executives wanting us there, I've seen both sides of that equation, and mea culpa. I've fallen trapped to this whole idea of being over deferential and just kind of staying in my box sometimes. Then I've gone the complete opposite way, which is I get super excited about a new technology or new something. I'm like, we got to do this. We got to do this. What's wrong with you people? Why aren't we doing this? And I know that's also the business case.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: It's the business case bringing that to the table first before we open our mouths too quickly to say, oh, you got to do this. You got to try this. Oh, it's really cool.

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Dan Nestle: Yeah. Speaking from a position of knowledge. Right. And evidence of. And it's a slower role. Right. You're so tempted. And I admire people or maybe don't even understand people who are able to just have a thought and just keep it in their head, because that's not me.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Sometimes it's so much better. You have a thought that turns into an idea. If you let that half baked idea out too soon, it will not come to fruition. I mean, I. I didn't tell anybody that my team and I were developing an AI facial analysis tool because maybe if I had shared it early on, people would have said, what, are you crazy? I mean, this is a tool that evaluates your face 98 different ways for emotions. Woo.

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Dan Nestle: Gonna get into that for sure. Yeah, that would be extremely handy in any number of situations. But, you know, get back to the idea of, you know, of being in the right mindset to be influential or to build influence, you know, I mean, it's a relationship building exercise, and it's confidence, too. Confidence. That's a tough one, right?

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Deirdre Breakenridge: You're not going to influence many people if you don't have confidence in who you are, what you're doing. You have to be fully present, aligned, and believing.

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Dan Nestle: Yeah, I mean, it's so critical, and we don't pay much attention to it. Right. We develop programs. We either. We have to reach ex stakeholders and, okay, let's find out the best way to reach those stakeholders. And we're always thinking about how to influence them.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Right?

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Dan Nestle: Right. We're always thinking about how to influence them. And in the past, it was a very one way discussion, or it wasn't even a discussion. It was a very one way channel. Now it's a conversation with our stakeholders. So we would do well to understand the principles of influence before engaging with any of our audiences. And then now, of course, with the interconnectedness inside of an organization or with your clients, we have to influence everyone, and there's a huge discomfort with that. But the idea of influence, I think some people think that influence equals, like, sales and persuasion. When you think about persuasion, it's like, oh, well, that's for the salespeople to do. Or I didn't go. I stayed away from sales. I don't want to put my opinion on anybody else. I don't feel good about that.

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Dan Nestle: But that's really not giving any credence or any, you know, any credit to the idea of influence as a core skill that communicators need to have. Yes, but it's a struggle for me, and I think it's a struggle for a lot of folks. And when we think about the future, I think influence is going to become even more and more powerful or more and more important. So let's go back to my question about, or my point about there being two sides to this whole influence equation. If you could just pinpoint the, like, the key things, the top factors that you need to be influential from the person who's seeking to be influential, point of view, us, I suppose, and then how that's received on the other side, what can we expect and how can we tell?

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Dan Nestle: How can we understand whether the other people or the other person is buying what we're selling?

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Right. Well, I touched on it before. It's emotional intelligence. You spoke of the relationship of influence. How do you have a relationship if you don't have the empathy that you need, the self discipline, the awareness, if you're not able to motivate, and if you're not managing a relationship? So that encompasses emotional intelligence. So I would say focus. Even though people look at emotional intelligence as, oh, it's a soft skill. No, it's a critical skill. And I think we learned that a lot through the pandemic, and we've upped the game in emotional intelligence. So sticking in that bucket is important. We talked a little bit about the confidence, and I'm going to link in the communication aspect. You have to be a good communicator to influence. And with good communication comes confidence because you need people to be confident in you.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: And you'll know when they're confident in you, because if you're paying attention and if you're self aware, you'll be able to read the signs and the cues that they give you, from the sound of their voice to the words they use to the body language that displays, when they're either recognizing that you're influencing them in a way and they're buying into it and they like it. I also think it's your ability to be authentic and also have ethical conduct. So if you are not bringing your genuine self to the table, who is going to trust in you? You need that transparency, which will kind of parlay into ethical conduct. Truth and honesty. All of that builds the relationship. The foundation has to be trust. You don't.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: I mean, granted, there are salespeople who you don't know, and somehow they pull an emotional string, and the next thing you know, you're writing a check for a charity that you didn't know about. But with trust as that foundation, you will be influenced more by someone, whether it's a friend, it's a family member, it's a colleague, a peer. And so those are some of the buckets or they. Do they resonate?

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Dan Nestle: Yeah. Yeah. I'm just nodding my head because trying to identify my own, you know, where I'm strong and what my deficiencies are in this particular area. And, you know, why. Where is it that the confidence part of it probably ebbs and flows? You know, these are all things that kind of. Well, I'd hope that ethics never ebbs and flows, and I would hope that. I hope that you're always authentic, you know, but confidence is. Maybe it's a fun, is it a function of, in some ways, of empathy, like when you feel that the other person isn't on board with what you're saying or what you're doing and it, you know, that jars your confidence. Whereas if you don't have a high empathy or you're not empathic, you're more likely to just be kind of, you know, confident by nature. I don't know.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: That's a tough one. That's really tough because most people think that they're empathetic, and maybe they are, or maybe they're just being sympathetic. But empathy is on different levels. And I think you have to break down the levels of empathy to truly understand where you are with the person who you're trying to influence and if you have the confidence. So the first level is that cognitive empathy?

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Dan Nestle: Yeah.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: And that's just your knowing that something is going on with them and your understanding. You might change the way you come across, the sound of your voice, the words that you use. You might open up your body language, but you're not quite tuned in to a deeper level. Then when you get to emotional empathy, that level, you really are on the inside and the person is sharing exactly what's going on. So maybe you do have a little more confidence in the understanding because they're sharing with you. All of this is based on a foundation of trust. And then the last level is compassionate, which compassionate empathy means. I know so much about your situation, Dan, that I can actually help you with an action plan. And through this action plan, you're going to help yourself through a situation.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: And that is a level of confidence and understanding that could go hand in hand.

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Dan Nestle: Is it. I mean, is it a learnable kind of progress to go from these, like a cog, somebody who has, like, a natural level of cognitive empathy, let's say, can, you know, is it possible to move up to this compassionate level? You know, is. Or is it. Is it learned or is it something that's practiced but not innate? Does it vary?

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Deirdre Breakenridge: I don't know if I have an easy answer for this. I feel it's a muscle that can be developed if. If you work at it. If you're on the cognitive level, then I don't know why you wouldn't be able to further that relationship and cultivate and take the time to truly walk a day in that person's shoes.

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Dan Nestle: I'm asking partly because it's fascinating to me, but also because I did an assessment a while back, and the assessment was one of these personality assessments and performance assessments that talks about your various tendencies and your characteristics on a. I forget how many point scale, but one of them was empathy. And the assessment tells you what your level of empathy is in relation to the rest of what you have. And there was an opposite, negative characteristic that pulled on empathy, and maybe it was logic. Empathy one side, logic on the others, which isn't negative. It's just, you know, kind of different things. And the assessment tells you how you behave at work, how you behave at home, and what your core is. So you got three different people that. Personalities that are sort of battling inside of you.

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Dan Nestle: My work empathy score was off the charts. But at home, apparently, I am like, I have zero empathy.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Surprise.

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Dan Nestle: And my core wasn't even that high either. And it was like. And I wasn't the only one. Like, there was a few other folks in our group who did this, and were like, oh, so we're the fake empaths. We're the lying empaths. Like, we're putting on a show. And I never felt it that way, honestly. But I've always, you know, I've never really given it much thought about how I could, like, raise that bar at home. Of course, I can raise the bar by being mindful, present, and listening very carefully to my wife. That would be the way.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Well, that just pegged it. If you have empathy in one area of your life, you can have it in another. But if you think about the way that the work life, I don't know if you call it balance, blend. Sometimes we're just off by the time you're home. Or if home is work, you might not be turning it off. So your wife doesn't get that empathy that you work so hard at your job to make sure it's present. That's all it is.

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Dan Nestle: There must be, like, a reservoir that gets depleted. Kind of like the Julia Cameron, like, artists way. Your creativity is like a reservoir, and you got occasionally refill the well or replenish the reservoir or whatever metaphor she uses. Maybe the same thing with empathy. I don't know. Anyway, I just. It plays so deeply into influence these days. I had a great guest recently named Chip Massey and his partner, Adele Gambardello. And Chip is an ex FBI hostage negotiator, an interrogator, and the sweetest guy. He was a preacher. I think originally when you see him, he could be the local pastor at the church, that kind of guy. You'd never know that he was, you know, a serious badass. Probably still is. But since leaving the FBI and everything, he's developed a framework forensic listening. Right.

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Dan Nestle: And, you know, just listen like it is listening, like being methodical and, I guess, mindful and extremely careful about the way that you listen with the intent of not answering things right away, of really, truly absorbing what somebody says and then giving yourself time to analyze. It's not like an on the fly thing. It's something that is a practice that evolves. And it seems to me that kind of deep listening is probably a key to influence, whether you call it forensic listening or something else. I agree, but.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Right, because if you're. We think we listen, too. That's the other thing. We think we're empathetic. We think we're actively listening. There's a lot that slips through. So this. I'm gonna look Chip? Is that what you said?

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Dan Nestle: Chip? Chip Massey.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Chip Massey. I'm gonna look him up.

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Dan Nestle: Yeah.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Because his model sounds interesting and useful.

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Dan Nestle: I'll do better than that. I will connect you with him.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Oh, that would be.

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Dan Nestle: Who's my guest?

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Awesome. Thank you.

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Dan Nestle: Take note, listeners. If I fail to do that, you can hold me accountable.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Yeah, I think that you certainly can't even get to a place of empathy. You don't have the deep listening. Listening is always the number one. The listening and the observing, because the more that we can take in, the more we can open up our senses and experience somebody else's map of the world and the pictures that they have in their heads, well, that informs us in the way that we're going to come across and to communicate. And that definitely plays a part influence.

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Dan Nestle: Yeah. It's that patience and pause. Pause being like one of the best words I've ever learned and hardly ever practice, unfortunately, but that patience to listen, that can be practiced. They always say that it's the quiet ones you need to watch out for in the room, and I think it's very true. It's the unassuming people who are listening, taking things very carefully, taking it all in, and they come back with a well thought, not only well thought response, but a genuine understanding of what's going on with my institutional ADHD and all that. I just feel like I see the end before they're even at the middle sometimes. And I jump right. And it's another thing I'd be aware of. But I think a lot of people are like that, especially in our profession. Communicators.

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Dan Nestle: We tend to be idea people, visionaries, people like this who just want to fix and help and help, and we can't get out of our own way sometimes. So a good framework for influence would really be helpful. Now, you're doing a lot of work in training people to be more influential and training. So what is your program and how are you helping people? And what are some of the learnings that you've had from that, from doing that program?

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Deirdre Breakenridge: So my program is called the influential communicator, and it is based on four c's. It's to learn to become calm, clear, concise, and confident so people can be confident in you. The goal of the program as you move through it is to get yourself aligned, because so much of the time we think we're communicating well, but what ends up is we don't have influence. And why not? So I teach how to enhance your vocal cues, to use your voice, the power of your voice, to think about the words you're using. Are they crisp? Are they concise? Are you getting the most important points across? How are you painting vivid pictures? And then to get to a point where you can deliver vocally and verbally and your body language flows, because that's where there's a break.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: You're not going to be influential if your voice sounds good and the words you're using, you've scripted them, but your body language is off, and that's what people are looking and observe it. And then once you learn about yourself and how to get into your own alignment and flow, you can then understand how to read the signals and the cues in the room. I work with a lot of financial services, asset managers, investment bankers. And that is the key, is to be able to read the signals in the cues. And you said early on, you asked, well, how do you know? Yeah, when you get good at understanding, even what happens to yourself, your voice, how you speak, how your, how you use your body language, you can then look at somebody else to understand.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: And I am certified in body language, and I study body language. And that's where, you know, did my confidence come through? It's in their reaction, how they sound, what they say, and the way their body moves.

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Dan Nestle: You know, it's interesting because I talk a lot about, you know, AI and the future of technology and, you know, the trends that are hitting our profession. And, you know, it's the trending communicator, after all. And there are these fundamental building blocks of what makes us good communicators that often get overlooked, but that are also, I think our understanding of these things is evolving, you know, over time and, you know, understanding where and how you need to be improving your interpersonal skill, especially two, wield influence in this case, is one of those core fundamentals. But I think it's evolved a lot over time and the pressures of everything that's going on around us, I don't know if it's denigrating these skills or if it is giving us opportunities to enhance these skills.

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Dan Nestle: Something I just curious about because let me just kind of try to illustrate a little bit, if I can, where when people were years and years ago I suppose well before either of us were on this earth, the calculator was invented, right? And theory, the thinking was, if you have calculators to people, they're going to forget how to use numbers, right. People say same things about AI. Sometimes if you've AI to people, they're going to forget how to write. I wonder if there's any kind of concomitant effect that happens to our influence skills, to being calm, clear, concise, and confident, to those abilities to read people that are affected in some way, good or bad, by the advent of so much technology and so much digital interaction. It's a philosophical question. Deirdre, I think you're on. What do you think?

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Deirdre Breakenridge: There's no doubt in my mind that technology, as helpful as it is, can be a huge distraction because the screen time, we're constantly getting stimulated by what we see. It's a dopamine hit when you're out there on social media, that all detracts from your ability to become clear, concise, and confident. So it's a balancing act. I still see it. I'll be the glass half full rather than the glass half empty. I say to any executive and business professional, be up for the challenge. This is the greatest challenge of your life, that you can use technology for the efficiencies to help advance our learning and what we're doing to enhance, but it should not take away from the skills and who you are as a professional.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: And that's where, if you're in communications, if you want to move the needle, you want to be an influencer, you need your calm. That's number one. Number one, your brain has to be calm in order for you to be verbally fluent. If your brain is spinning because of all the technology and the excitement and the dopamine hits, you can't get the words out.

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Dan Nestle: How true is that? I mean, that's me half the time. My brain is spinning a lot. My first episode in the trending communicator in this iteration of my show was Matt Abrahams, and he wrote a book called think faster, talk smarter. He's the host of that podcast, I think, of the same name at Stanford. And some of the things that he said led to that same point, that calmness, that need to overcome your anxiety or tamp down your excitement, whatever it may be, to get started. And im kind of veering a little bit off from this idea of technology or things that are potentially denigrating our capability to be human in leadership. Human and leader and human leaders and influencers. Boy, that was a weird way to string the words together.

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Dan Nestle: But when it comes back down to the common thread, here is for the future, for now, for hopefully forever. We, as humans who are leading the profession and communicating, can't lose sight of this core set of human skills. So it's more important than ever, I think, to build these skills to work on being a better listener and figuring out some way to calm yourself and get a clear head now more than ever, because the noise is just going to get louder and louder.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Yes, I agree.

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Dan Nestle: Yeah. So we need to talk to Deirdre a lot more about this. Thank you. What do you think about the. I know were talking a little bit about playing with AI and the idea it's a black box. We still don't know everything that it can do. And sooner or later, we're gonna have agents where you can just kind of, you know, say, go make me a reservation. You know what's funny? I said, make me a reservation. And just the other day I was criticizing somebody, like, just internally criticizing people for always using food as the first kind of example. When people talk about a new technology. I don't know if you ever noticed that, you know, somebody introduces a new robot, it'll deliver a pizza for you.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Our minds are in our stomachs.

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Dan Nestle: Yeah. AI, it's a great recipe book, right? I mean, you can make, you can, you know, and it's funny. So anyway, I was a little hypocritical there for a second, but the point is that, you know, you've got this great and very unknown thing, right? And you have these agents that are coming very soon that you can give it orders to do things. You're not going to be able to tell an agent, an AI agent, to go and influence a CEO for you. You're not going to be able to say, hey, look, I've got a meeting in 24 hours. I need to prepare all the information. It'll get you the information, but can you go talk to the CEO for me and start to put in the good word? Or can you build a relationship with me? Can you negotiate for me?

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Dan Nestle: Can you build trust for me? Will not happen. Cannot happen. So we're on safe ground there, but also it's a ground that we need to be really very protective of and careful of, I think, because anything could happen.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: We could have super robots who can certainly do everything. But I think for now, what I'm hearing you say is that we want that seat at the table. That's number one. And how can we use AI to enhance this for us? So a lot of what we do, that's tedious, that takes our time and pulls us away from the strategy because I spent many years in communications where it's, why are PR people so tactical strategy?

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Dan Nestle: Oh, that's a great point because there's.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: A lot of, there's a lot of tactics and research and tedious things. However, which builds it does become a part of the strategy and in some cases with the research. But I think AI gets us to a place of enhanced efficiency. It gives us the speed that we need and the personalization that we can get. It gives us real time insights that, yes, you do have to check and double check and corroborate sources so that you can bring that to the table and be fully are and to have more information that will help you to negotiate and to give you a business case. So I think that the glass is half full. In a sense, we've got some power and we're not going to leave everything to AI. Just as you said, you don't want somebody building trust with the CEO for you.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: You're going to do that. So using it to our benefit.

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Dan Nestle: Yeah. And you mentioned all of the reasons why it's easy to adopt AI from a business standpoint. We get those productivity benefits. We can take care of enhanced efficiency and personalization, and those are for an open minded organization or for people who kind of understand what's going on a little bit, even a little bit. It's very clear when you go to somebody and say, I've been able to free up 1520, 40% of my time, the question is, what do you do with that? Like what do you do at that time that you freed up? Now my argument, of course, is that we can continue to use the tools that we have available to us in so many more kind of, even yet unknown, but so many more ways to enhance our strategic capabilities, get above the tactics.

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Dan Nestle: But once people kind of get those little tactical things, and they're not little, but some of that drudgery or some of the tedious work done, they take a breath and then, okay, what do I do with myself? And maybe like learning. Well, learning is absolutely right.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Yes. Be curious, innovate, take the time to enhance areas that you have great deep interest and purpose and passion. So even if it's do I have time on the job to do things and I would learn for my company and bring new things to the table, could be that. But if I'm freeing up time that I have outside of work, then where's my passion, and what can I do there that enhances me and gives me energy?

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Dan Nestle: Yeah. And I'm starting to experience that a little bit more. My other problem is that when I have more time, I just think of more projects and interesting things that I want to pursue, so I have to. Prioritization is becoming a very critical skill for me. But I was also thinking that we're so kind of hardwired or trained in many ways in work to just keep doing things. Do, do. Right. You got to do something. You got to produce something. You got to present. So when you free up some time, an unfortunate number of people, I think that learning is not work. So, know, let's put. Let's put that aside for a second.

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Dan Nestle: Wouldn't it make sense to sort of look at that extra time you gain, whether it's a half hour or 2 hours a week or more, as your opportunity to build your influence skills, among other things.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Right.

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Dan Nestle: You know, and you said learn. Of course they could take your course, and that's fantastic. And I highly recommend everybody do that. The website will be in the lit, in the show notes. However, there's so much people can do, and are they using their time properly? We keep saying, move up the value chain. What does that look like? What does that mean? I think it means getting those human skills right.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Yeah, I agree. I think we need more work on our human skills, because when we build our human skills, we have better relationships. Better relationships are built on trust, and trust. And your own confidence gets you to the influence. It's like a little chain reaction.

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Dan Nestle: It's crazy, you know, and we've been talking about how I think there's a lot of space gonna be opened up for us, and we can grow into that space in different ways. And yet there's. Or not yet. Cause it's not a contrary thing. But at the same time, there's some incredible developments happening in even more novel innovations that help us to be more human in some ways. And here, of course, I'm giving you a nice segue into what you're doing with AI now, Deirdre, and you alluded to it earlier, your facial recognition tool. That's all the information I have is it's a facial recognition tool. So can you tell us a little more about that?

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Sure.

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Dan Nestle: Because I think the implications certainly are, you know, are quite broad, and the application can be quite broad, and the ethical use thereof is going to be extremely critical. But, yeah.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Yes, of course, I wanted to have a tool as a part of my program that shows professionals that sometimes when you, what you say and how you come across or you think you're being perceived isn't exactly accurate. And this tool picks up on, of course, expressions, but also micro expressions. Our face flashes, these quick signals, we'll call them within one 10th to 120 fifth of a second. And if you can imagine, it's happening all of the time, and we've developed it in such a way that you can now go on. You can be a beta tester. It's free. Go to FIQ AI. And once you log in as a beta tester, you'll notice that the AI camera ball starts to track you in four different quadrants. The quadrants are a high control quadrant, a low control quadrant, an obstructive quadrant, and a conductive quadrant.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: And just as they're named, you can kind of tell you want to be in high control. Conductive is a good one. Obstructive is annoying and angry. That's not a good one. And the low control is some of those lower feeling emotions. Maybe you're down. Melancholy, could even be depressed. So the ball just keeps tracking you. That's number one. It shows you when you are in the universal buckets of emotions. You're happy, sad, fear, disgust, neutral. It tracks you that way. It also gets into emotional arousal, how long something sticks on your face, whether it's and where you are in a quadrant, as well as the intensity of the emotion, because each quadrant can be very low intensity or a high intensity. There's a big difference between being slightly suspicious and completely not trusting and having that negative, intense emotion.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: So it's a way to go on and record yourself as you speak. You're giving a presentation, you go on, you use the tool, you record, you download the video, it's captured, you watch the playback, which, I mean, to this day, I still don't understand. Well, I do understand it's cringey to watch yourself. It's just cringy. And now to have on top of it this intelligence tool letting you know that when you were saying something you thought was positive and you were influencing, it put you in a different quadrant with an emotion that you had no idea. And it shows you what your face did. And that's valuable when you're selling, when you're pitching, when you're negotiating, when you want to move any kind of needle and have influence.

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Dan Nestle: And these are things you can practice, of course, and learn, right? I mean, that's, you know, I have been. I've had some fun leading workshops and, you know, doing some presentations here and there and doing some. A little bit of public speaking, you know, panel discussions and, you know, introducing people and whatnot. And recently, I was. I had the pleasure of introducing. Recently. Last year, I had the pleasure of introducing Mark Schaeffer at a. At a big conference. And, you know, Mark's my friend, and we had a great time, and certainly he did a killer presentation. He's a great speaker. I didn't prepare my introduction until just a few minutes before went on, and I was just. I'm just doing the little introduction. I'm going to stand by the podium, and this is my audience. Anyway, they all know me.

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Dan Nestle: It's a low pressure thing. Now, my introduction was nice. It was perfectly fine. But afterwards, I talked to Mark, who's always straight up and brutally honest with me. He said, you know, I get the sense sometimes that you're winging it, Daniel. You know, okay, hold up a mirror. I mean, it's exactly right. And this idea of just kind of. Okay. Practicing and rehearsing, especially understanding. Yeah, it gives me a little bit of the heebie jeebies, because I. You know, I'm like. That means I have work to do, and I. You know, it's like. It's like you understand there's a weakness in your I. In your whole system, and you just hesitate to address that weakness because you got other things to do. And if it's not festering and causing problems, well, just let it lie. But really, we should be addressing those.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Weaknesses, especially because you said that influence will become more important as technology grows. Now, here's something to think about. When you use an AI tool, whether it's our Fiq or. Or it's another tool, there's only a certain percent of accuracy, and you don't want to get tripped up there. It's knowing that when you're on the tool that you have to check and double check, because it's, what, 65, 70% accurate. AI on our tool sometimes doesn't understand that. When you use your head to punctuate, sometimes we use our brow to illustrate, and our eyebrows go up for an important point, like I'm doing now, AI might say, oh, dear, just surprised. And if you're surprised, you're over in the obstructive quadrant, as opposed to positive. I'm really excited about this point that I want to share.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: So, knowing yourself, you have to be able to say, oh, I get that's a little off there. It'll get better. It will. Remember, with social media and sentiment, there was a time that sentiment tracking was way low, 50%, 60%, and then all of a sudden bumped up 88, 95%. That's what's going to happen here, too.

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Dan Nestle: Yeah, it's better and better all the time. And facial recognition itself is just a leading edge technology. There was a moment, and it seemed to happen overnight, where if you were a global entry person coming back to the US from abroad, you had to put your passport into the little scanner, but now you just kind of glance into the camera and clear works the same way. So it's a technology that is now embedded in our world.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Right.

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Dan Nestle: So why not use it to our advantage? Why not have it now? There's some creepiness there, of course, as there is with a lot of these AI things, but it seems to me that something that. That I definitely want to try because I'm fidgety. Yeah, I definitely want to do it.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: We're trying to put the analytics behind it. That's what we're working on now, analytics package, so that you understand. You were on the tool for ten minutes. You gave your presentation, how much time was spent in each quadrant. What were the dominant emotions? Just so you have a better understanding when you walk away. And that's coming soon.

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Dan Nestle: Oh, that would be super useful. Like having your own coach, your own performance coach.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Exactly.

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Dan Nestle: You can use that if you're not already. There's so much going on here. I mean. I mean, the whole concept of influence certainly is overwhelming to me in some ways. And every time that I've in a role in the past where I haven't gotten to where I needed to go, I do tend to, you know, blame myself, and oftentimes it is my fault. Right. Okay. Or I can find the core, the root cause in my own behavior or my own choices, more like my own choices, I think, and influence, probably the failure to wield influence or wielding the wrong kind of influence, or pointing my energies toward the. Toward kind of places where, you know, there weren't the highest priorities.

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Dan Nestle: Nine times out of ten, that's a cause of some sort of gap of understanding or urgency or where I called it an urgency gap recently, where my priorities are different from the organizations and there's no compromise there. There's no attempt to understand how to move my priorities closer to theirs and theirs close because they're not going to move them to mine. And that's gotten me in hot water. It's all retrospect. Right. Reflectively speaking and valuable learning. But if you had that kind of understanding ahead of time, really could be calm, be mindful of your own influence skills. I think that would be extremely powerful, especially on your leadership journey. I can't stress enough. Everybody go find Deirdre.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Thank you.

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Dan Nestle: So the last thing I'm going to ask you, Deirdre, really, is, you know, just looking into, you know, looking into the future, what's coming down the pike, and whether it's through the science of influence, I'm sure you have some neuroscience involved there as well, or, you know, what's going on with that as it applies to communications and marketing. What do you see ahead of us or even now that's kind of moving forward? That either gives you pause or gives you great joy. I'm going to leave that open to you to decide. Because you're a glass half full person. I want to make sure that you have the chance to be joyful and glorious as you always are.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Well, the half full person wants to congratulate all the leaders who are taking emotional intelligence and empathy seriously. Seeing it as critical skills, must have skills. So I think we're going to need a lot more in that area and to always be feeling.

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Dan Nestle: Always be feeling.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Always be feeling. We can't take that for granted. Not that we're ever truly going to know how somebody feels. However, based on the forensic listening and the ability to study and understand kind of the pictures in someone's head, we have a great opportunity. I think we're going to see a lot more in the influence arena. We're definitely going to see a lot more in the AI arena. And that's where I hope that people realize in our industry, you have a seat at the table. Don't stop going for it. Have the confidence to want to be there and the reason to be there. And that does come from, I do believe, enhancing your skills. Some of the buckets that we talked about.

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Dan Nestle: Yeah.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: We are our own resistance, Dan. I truly believe that we have opportunities, but we get in the way of ourselves.

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Dan Nestle: It's funny, the book that's on my desk right now is this one, the.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: War of art, a long time ago. Great book.

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Dan Nestle: Yeah, I have it like dog eared. I check it out from time to time. But it's a. You talk about the resistance, it just immediately popped in my head. That's your enemy. Your enemy is the resistance that's inside of you and that's keeping you from doing things. Takes on a lot of names, but I want to take away from this conversation first of all that, I continue to be enamored with Deirdre Breckenridge. But second of all that, I want to work on my methodically work on this influence because it's a gap in my whole, or it's a missing part of my toolkit or whatever you want to call it.

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Dan Nestle: And, you know, I'm so vested in helping our communications and marketing colleagues and peers to deal with the future, to cope with the future, to understand technology, to accelerate AI in their organizations, because I do believe it is a key that's going to unlock a lot of incredible work for us and a safe future for us. And when I say safe, I mean I want everybody to have a job, and I want everybody to be employed, and I want everybody to be doing things that they're happy with and having a great time. And I think there's more now with AI that you can do. All that said, I'll be able to do it better if I can be a better influencer. And that is just gold from my perspective. So, Deirdre, I want to thank you.

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Dan Nestle: I wanted to let everybody know that Deirdre is extremely findable. Go to LinkedIn. Look for deirdre Breckenridge. Her name will be spelled properly in the episode. Graphic and notes. Check out deirdrebrackenridge.com dot, for, you know, for her resources to find out what she's up to learn about her training programs. The, her company, pureperformancecom.com as well, is a good place to go to just see some of the services, some of the things that she's done in her, in her career. FiQ AI for the beta test of the facial recognition, you know, emotion detector thingy. Majig thank you, Dan. I think it's amazing. Any place else, Deirdre, where you spend your time, where people can find you?

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Deirdre Breakenridge: No, I think you hit it. I want everybody to know I'm a LinkedIn learning instructor, so I do have courses on LinkedIn learning. I hope you check them out. And this has just been such a great conversation. Thank you.

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Dan Nestle: Thank you. And definitely everybody go look up DeIRdre if you don't know her. Ready? And thank you very much.

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Deirdre Breakenridge: Thank you.

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Dan Nestle: Thanks for taking the time to listen in on today's conversation. If you enjoyed it, please be sure to subscribe through the podcast player of your choice. Share with your friends and colleagues, and leave me a review. Five stars would be preferred, but it's up to you. Do you have ideas for future guests or you want to be on the show, let me know@danrendingcommunicator.com. Thanks again for listening to the trending communicator.