Vanessa Van Edwards on Navigating the Virtual Workplace in Stressful Times
1Description
The world has dramatically changed in just a few weeks. As companies around the world shift to remote work, how do we navigate this crisis? Distributed host Matt Mullenweg talks to Vanessa Van Edwards, bestselling author, speaker, and founder of Science of People, about how we communicate with our friends, family, and coworkers during a time when Zoom and Slack are our primary tools for understanding each other.
To learn more about Vanessa’s work, visit scienceofpeople.com.
The full episode transcript is below.
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(Intro Music)
MATT MULLENWEG: Howdy, everyone. Welcome back to the Distributed Podcast. This is our first episode since, well, everything has changed for our lives, for our family and friends and for the way we work. A lot of folks have been using Distributed.blog as a resource for remote work and best practices, so we wanted to do everything we can to help folks out in the weeks and months to come and look for lots of updates to the website that are already happening.
Today we are going to speak with Vanessa Van Edwards, an expert on public speaking who had to change the way she thought about her own work. And she also has some great tips for how we present ourselves in remote work as well. So without further ado, here is my chat with Vanessa.
Welcome, Vanessa Van Edwards.
VANESSA VAN EDWARDS: Thank you so much for having me.
MATT: I’m very excited. And also, thank you for.. you were one of our featured speakers at the Grand Meetup.
VANESSA: [laughs] Yes.
MATT: So just to give some background to the listeners, once a year, Automattic would bring everyone together and we invite very few awesome speakers and Vanessa was one of them last year.
VANESSA: It was such a lovely audience, too. I remember they actually gave me a standing ovation, which made me cry on stage.
MATT: Well, thank you very much. And it was I think one of the earlier talks we had in the week so it ended up being fairly influential. Just to give a little bit of background for you though.. Now my understanding is you actually started off doing more online teaching?
VANESSA: Yeah, I did. I actually stumbled into the online course arena before I even realized that was a thing. I was also on YouTube back in 2007, if you can believe that, when people thought that YouTube was a joke and a fad.
And then online courses, I started my first online course in 2011-2012, and thank goodness, because at the time I was teaching a lot of engineers, programmers, accountants people skills. As you know, Matt, I like to joke, I’m a recovering awkward person. And so I was teaching soft skills in a very science-backed way. And so there was a platform called Udemy, where a lot of engineers were taking courses on programming and software, and so I thought well, let me put my “Charisma for Engineers” course on there and see what happens. And little did I know it would totally explode and change my life.
MATT: Wow. So YouTube at the time was I guess pictures of dogs on skateboards. What were you putting on there at the time?
VANESSA: [laughs] Yes. You know what was really hot when I first got on there? Does anyone remember fingerboarding? Do you remember that craze?
MATT: Ohh, miniature skateboards that you would do with your fingers?
VANESSA: Yes! Yes, so I remember –
MATT: Wow, I haven’t thought about that in a long time.
VANESSA: Okay, so I remember I was competing with fingerboarding videos. That was a thing that I was competing against. And in the beginning I was just doing very casual, on-my-phone communication tips, conversation tricks. And the funny part is because it was so casual, YouTube in the beginning was very, very casual, I was doing them from my bedroom and in a weird way that actually endeared me to people and I think got me to really make long-time students.
MATT: It probably felt a lot more authentic, which people now do on purpose. And you, I guess you grew through this and published a book in 2017 called Captivate. Can you just give us a quick rundown so people can check that out?
VANESSA: Yes, for sure. So I always would walk into rooms in college and interviews and I always felt like everyone had this written rulebook of social interaction that I was just missing. And I quickly picked up every book I could find on social skills and relationships and friendships, Dale Carnegie and Cialdini, everything I could find.
And one thing I figured out very early was that most social-skills books were written by extroverts. And I am an ambivert, so I am somewhere in between. I lean towards introversion and I also have a lot of social anxiety and awkwardness. And if you are trying to learn people skills from an extrovert who is naturally very good with people, they say very well-meaning things to you, like just be yourself, or be more authentic, or smile more, or be more outgoing. Telling an introvert or an awkward person to be more outgoing is like telling them to not be themselves. So I really wanted to —
MATT: Hmm. It reminds me of that advice where sometimes people are freaking out and you’re like, “just relax,” which is probably the least helpful thing to say to someone.
VANESSA: Amen. I’m also a high neurotic, I mean, I feel bad sharing all my dirty laundry already, it’s only the first five minutes, but never in the history of “calm down” has “calm down” ever calmed anyone down. It’s exactly the same thing with ambiverts and introverts.
So I thought what if there was a way for me to study people like you study for chemistry or math with formulas and vocabulary words and maps of networking events and specific tips on what to do with your hands? And that is what Captivate ended up being. But I had no idea that this book would reach as many people as it did. It’s in 16 languages now, which is shocking, and I had no idea there were so many people who were also struggling with awkwardness.
MATT: How did that turn into a speaking career? Did the speaking come first or did the book come first?
VANESSA: The speaking came first actually. Speaking came even before online courses. I started doing group speaking. And in the beginning, because I was, in the beginning I had a niche. In a business they always say niche, niche, niche.
And I had taken a weekend passive income course when I was 17 years old — thank you, Mom — my mom is a lawyer and she said, I never want you to be paid for your hours, I want you to create this thing, this magical thing, called passive income. So she sent me to a seminar in a big ballroom in Los Angeles and I learned about this concept called passive income. And one of the things on there was creating a website or a blog, writing books and then doing speaking. Now speaking is active income, but it, quote/unquote, “can sell books.”
So in the beginning I was told to pick a niche and at the time I was 17, so I picked parenting and teens. And so I was speaking to —
MATT: [laughs]
VANESSA: I know, I know. It’s just funny how my business has grown out of that. But I was speaking to PTAs, I was speaking to student groups, I was speaking to some companies, parents, lunch-and-learns. And that is what got my feet wet in the corporate world, realizing “oh, you can reach a lot of people at the same time.” And so slowly I started to grow my corporate speaking and I have been doing that probably since 2008.
MATT: And so just to set the stage a little bit, we’re recording this at the beginning of April, everyone is affected by this COVID-19 pandemic, where in the world are you located?
VANESSA: I’m in Austin, Texas.
MATT: And as a fellow Texan, I’m glad you’re here, but things… We’re probably a little bit behind other places but it will probably get bad here this month.
VANESSA: Mhm.
MATT: What have you found so far in your own work as you’ve had to shift in this self-isolation world?
VANESSA: Yes. We saw massive shifts almost from day one. And I think on the personal side, this crisis is having everyone face their personal demons — people’s fear of being alone, people’s fear of being out of control, people’s fear of germs.
And one of my fears, definitely, is being out of control. And so in our business we have grown very, very organically specifically on keywords. I bet you didn’t expect me to go to that answer with that question. [laughter] But let me try to explain how this goes.
So I didn’t realize this literally until three or four weeks ago — so we have never had to buy traffic or buy ads or pay for traffic. Our first ad campaign was last May, so less than a year
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