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Mirroring
I’m a huge believer in mirroring behavior. I’m an extrovert. I tend to create environments naturally and without thinking that are not very conducive to introverts. I’ll start meetings in a way where I’ve not given people the agenda. I have not told people what we’re going to talk about. And I expect people to just brainstorm and figure it out. Not super conducive to introverts. And so how I do better is I mirror the behavior to make sure that introverts are being cared for. That we are creating an environment that is conducive for introverts to be able to shine and to be able to contribute. But there’s more to it than just behavior.
And I learned that from a woman that’s featured in the book by the name of Courtney Seared, who talks about mirroring actual voice and interaction with human beings on a one-to-one basis. Where when you listen to the rhythm of somebody’s speech, when you listen to the cadence, when you listen to even words that they use, using words like I feel versus I think versus I see versus I hear, it tells you so much about who they are and how they process information. If somebody keeps saying, “I hear you, but XYZ”, they’re an auditory person. Please don’t bring a printout of a bunch of slides and expect them to process it successfully. Bring them something that is going to feed that auditory nature that they clearly prefer.
I think what we’re taught is we’re taught one way to do it. If you have a floppy handshake, make it firm. If you have a certain work environment that you’re going to, you’re going to Wall Street, dress one particular way. If you’re going to Silicon Valley, dress this other way. And the reality is, there is no one size fits all culture. If you’re really going to succeed, you’re to adapt to the person directly in front of you and you’re going to adjust not to be a chameleon that is a different person depending on who you’re talking to, but you’re going to make it so that what you’re putting forward has a higher likelihood of actually being heard and understood and loved.
Discovering Your Secret Sauce
I am a connector. I love connecting human beings. I love finding somebody who needs something and pairing them up with somebody who can provide it. To me, that’s the juice that I live on. But one of the things that I found a few years ago, and it was a really good moment for me to realize in some ways what my secret sauce was and something that I definitely wish everyone else would use was that there was a particularly stressful, busy, massive program that was launching. And it was called The United State of Women. It came out of the Council on Women And Girls in the Barack Obama White House. And it was a conference that was going to involve 5,000 people. It involved Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffett, Michelle Obama, everyone in the world was going to be at this conference. It was high stress. It was high stakes. And the organizers you can imagine were really difficult to reach out to. I was partnered with them and I was supporting them. But I was also imagining that they were getting 5 million calls from every direction in the world, but they always answered my phone call.
And towards the end, right before the conference launched, I remember giving them a call and starting off by saying, “Listen, I can only imagine how buried you are, but I have something to ask for you.” And the woman on the other end of the phone said to me, “Nathalie, I will always answer the phone when you call, because you are the only person of all the people clamoring for my time and asking me for things. You are the only person that starts every single phone call with the words, ‘What do you need?’” And it was at that moment that I realized that there was the secret sauce. There was this thing that allowed me to connect people and to call in favors and to actually see things be realized. And it was ultimately just that. It’s that every time I ask for something, I am first preceding it by making sure that the person on the other end of the phone is feeling heard and is feeling serviced and is feeling like this is a mutually beneficial relationship that starts with them.