Speaker 1: Would you like to improve the quality of your thinking, Well,
Speaker 1: then you need to improve the quality of your writing.
Speaker 1: If you need proof, look no further than Francis Fry,
Speaker 1: an author, ted speaker, and professor at Harvard Business School.
Speaker 1: Clearly she's an excellent thinker, but it doesn't happen by accident.
Speaker 1: Francis believes writing is the key to unlocking and improving
Speaker 1: our thinking, and she takes it seriously. She writes draft
Speaker 1: after draft after draft, continuously shedding flabby thinking until her
Speaker 1: presentations are lean, meaned, thought machines. And she didn't get
Speaker 1: here alone. All those drafts, and especially the ones written
Speaker 1: well after Francis thinks she's done, are mandated by her
Speaker 1: wife and fellow leadership expert, Anne Morris. Francis credits much
Speaker 1: of her success to Anne's attention to detail and dogged persistence,
Speaker 1: not just as a co writer, but as an in
Speaker 1: house mentor. So, what is the most valuable piece of
Speaker 1: advice Francis has received from her wife, Anne? My name
Speaker 1: is doctor amanthe Imber. I'm an organizational psychologist and the
Speaker 1: founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how
Speaker 1: I work A show about how to help you do
Speaker 1: your best work. On today's My Favorite Tip episode, we
Speaker 1: go back to an interview from the past and I
Speaker 1: pick out my favorite tip from the interview. In today's show,
Speaker 1: I speak with Francis and Anne, and I asked Francis
Speaker 1: what the best career advice she has ever received would be.
Speaker 2: Well, by far, the best career advice I receive is
Speaker 2: from Anne, so I may if I ever have disproportionate success,
Speaker 2: I get twenty four to seven of this, so it's
Speaker 2: so fair. But I'll tell you some of the things.
Speaker 2: I mean. Anne helped me understand the window mirror metaphor,
Speaker 2: and that to be other distracted. I had intuition about it,
Speaker 2: but she really helped me understand that you met me
Speaker 2: at the trust. Well, Anne and I worked on that talk.
Speaker 2: I happened to be the one that delivered it. So
Speaker 2: I would work overnight and she would work in the morning,
Speaker 2: and then I would work overnight. And what I learned
Speaker 2: is that the purpose of a first draft is to
Speaker 2: be embarrassed by it by the second draft. I did
Speaker 2: not know that, and I mean, and then I thought
Speaker 2: the first draft, okay, well, the second draft, let's poor
Speaker 2: liquid svent on that and then she would do another,
Speaker 2: and another and another, and it just blew my mind
Speaker 2: on that part. So it's the looking out the window
Speaker 2: of others, and that writing is a really wonderful form
Speaker 2: of thinking. And I just always thought I was a
Speaker 2: bad writer, so I didn't participate in it very much.
Speaker 2: And it has just unleashed my ability to think and
Speaker 2: improved my ability to communicate, even though I still communicate
Speaker 2: with shapes more than words. I hear it like in
Speaker 2: that Ted talk, I had to draw shapes on the
Speaker 2: on the blackboard. But I think those two things really
Speaker 2: the mirror and the and the revision of ideas, and
Speaker 2: that that's and that writing is a great form of thinking.
Speaker 2: I love that.
Speaker 3: How about you, Ann I'm gonna I'm going to answer
Speaker 3: this as a category advice of advice with the headline
Speaker 3: of don't believe everything you think, and I'll add a
Speaker 3: little texture to that, which so I'm an authenticity wobbler,
Speaker 3: an empathy anchor authenticity wobbler in our lexicon. When I
Speaker 3: was starting companies in a previous career, I spent a
Speaker 3: lot of time raising money from venture capitalists, a task
Speaker 3: at which I was terrible in the beginning and back
Speaker 3: to our conversation about trust. You know, it is one
Speaker 3: of those conversations that is all about I mean, particularly
Speaker 3: when you're raising money for a company that does not
Speaker 3: yet exist. You are asking people to jump off a
Speaker 3: cliff with you, and so if they don't trust you
Speaker 3: even a little bit, there's no way they're taking that leap.
Speaker 3: And so in the beginning, I would, you know, get
Speaker 3: up at the front of the room. And I was
Speaker 3: very distracted by the idea that I was a woman,
Speaker 3: and I was young, and I had never done this before,
Speaker 3: and I was queer, and I was in some rooms
Speaker 3: where no woman had been in except to like take
Speaker 3: a lunch order or deliver a man like I was
Speaker 3: so distracted by the surroundings, and as I tried to
Speaker 3: figure out what was going wrong, I kept misdiagnosing and
Speaker 3: kept you know, confidence and swagger, and I just became
Speaker 3: more There was more and more preteenpse pretending to be
Speaker 3: the person in the front of the room that they
Speaker 3: wanted to see, which people can figure out very quick.
Speaker 3: The human animal can smell that one from all well anyway,
Speaker 3: So I figured out it was authenticity. One of the
Speaker 3: frameworks that was very helpful to me was the wonderful
Speaker 3: Byron Katie's for essential questions, and the idea is to
Speaker 3: identify the thought so that you know the thought in
Speaker 3: that room might be this is a room that doesn't
Speaker 3: value me. So the first question on the list of
Speaker 3: essential question is is it true? And your answers, of
Speaker 3: course it's true. The second question is is it really true?
Speaker 3: She's as zooming your answer the first one is the
Speaker 3: wrong and in fact, it's never totally true. And then
Speaker 3: the questions get really fun, which is they're like, well,
Speaker 3: could the opposite be true? Could it be that you
Speaker 3: don't value the other, you don't value the people in
Speaker 3: the room, or you are undervaluing your It's not that
Speaker 3: they're undervaluing you, it's that you're undervaluing you. And let's
Speaker 3: take a look at the data. Your name seems to
Speaker 3: be on the lit like you seem to be invited
Speaker 3: to stand up at the front of the room and
Speaker 3: take everyone's time. Somehow you've concluded that your voice is
Speaker 3: not being valued, and yet you are the only one speaking.
Speaker 3: Everyone is taking notes on what you're saying, right, So
Speaker 3: it's really fun. And then the last question is really
Speaker 3: the moment of liberation. And I think this idea of
Speaker 3: freedom is what is most motivating to me in this work.
Speaker 3: Can I help get people in touch with a sense
Speaker 3: of freedom that they have not been able to give
Speaker 3: themselves up to this point? But the moment of liberation is, well,
Speaker 3: who would you be if you weren't dragging the story around?
Speaker 3: And do you have the power to let it go?
Speaker 3: And what's on the other side of letting that story go?
Speaker 3: And it doesn't mean that there's no data to support
Speaker 3: your original story, and it doesn't mean that there's not
Speaker 3: someone in the room that's thinking, well, I really prefer
Speaker 3: a dude, maybe, but that's not helpful to me, and
Speaker 3: that's not what everybody's thinking. And that guy may be
Speaker 3: easily persuaded once I actually say something useful as opposed
Speaker 3: to getting stuck in my own head and that like,
Speaker 3: those are the sandboxes that are really fun for me.
Speaker 3: And that's part of the experimentation. Is if I'm not
Speaker 3: willing to do that work in my own life, then
Speaker 3: I cannot be helpful in facilitating that kind of work
Speaker 3: for anybody else.
Speaker 1: If you would like to listen to the rest of
Speaker 1: my chat with Anne and Francis You can check out
Speaker 1: the link to the full episode in the show notes.
Speaker 1: If you're looking for more tips to improve the way
Speaker 1: that you work, I write a short fortnightly newsletter that
Speaker 1: contains three cool things that I've discovered that helped me
Speaker 1: work better, ranging from soft and gadgets that I'm loving
Speaker 1: through to interesting research findings. You can sign up for
Speaker 1: that at Howiwork dot co. That's how I work dot co.
Speaker 1: How I Work is produced by Inventium with production support
Speaker 1: from Dead Set Studios, and thank you to mat Nimba
Speaker 1: who does the audio mix for every episode and makes
Speaker 1: everything sound so much better than it would have otherwise.
Speaker 1: See you next time.