
Communicating For Impact And Lasting Change, With Tamsen Webster
Clear and impactful communication is a skill that shapes careers and transforms organizations. J.R. Lowry welcomes Tamsen Webster, a messaging designer and author, who shares her insights on communicating for impact. Together, they discuss how mastering communication can help leaders inspire change, build trust, and create lasting connections. Drawing from her varied career and best-selling books, Tamsen highlights practical strategies for crafting deeply resonating messages that truly matter to the chosen audience. Whether you are leading your own team, pitching an idea, or navigating a crucial change, this episode will equip you with the right tools to make every word count.
Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/tamsen-webster.
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Communicating For Impact And Lasting Change, With Tamsen Webster
My guest is Tamsen Webster. Part messaging designer, part English-to-English translator, and now part Doctoral student, Tamsen helps leaders craft their case for large-scale change. She was named to the Thinkers50 Radar in 2022, and she’s the author of two bestselling books, Find Your Red Thread: Make Your Big Ideas Irresistible and Say What They Can’t Unhear: The 9 Principles of Lasting Change. In our discussion, we’re going to be covering the importance of communication, no matter what you do for a living, Tamsen’s latest book, and her broader and varied career journey. Tamsen, welcome, and thank you for doing the show with me.
My pleasure. I’m delighted to be here, JR.
Great. Why are communication skills so important?
Communication Skills Are Essential For Leaders
If you think about it, there is very little we can do as leaders as humans without some form of, “I have a thing in my head and I needed to get into your head.” For most of us, that comes down to words and our ability to get the right words in the right order and deliver them in the right way. That information that’s in my head gets into your head with this little distortion and maximum understanding as possible. To me, they are the central skill. I would also say, based on my experience, that despite all of that, they remain one of the least taught, which is a very strange paradox, but it seems to be true nonetheless.
There are a lot of things like that. We’ve been exploring some of them in some of the interviews we’ve been doing, just the things that nobody ever really gets taught. They’re so foundational to work, life, happiness, and all of that. Maybe we should spend less time on trigonometry and more time on things like communication.
The thing is that things like trigonometry are beautiful at teaching, like critical thinking and problem-solving, but we don’t frame them that way. The first part of my educational career was split between professional degrees and liberal arts and humanities, so I can say with some authority that a lot of times, professional degrees are teaching people certain skills and how to do a thing, but not necessarily why you’re doing it that way or teaching us how do you do this outside of this particular context?
What about this is constant or at least slow changing over time? That, I think, particularly with the rise of AI, is really critical to make yourself as indispensable as possible to an organization or just to feel good about yourself, to be able to develop those skills that are the kinds of things that computers can’t do or can’t do nearly as well.
That’s becoming, as you say, more and more important in this age of AI. The tasks that we all do at work are slowly being taken away. Now, being able to distill large amounts of information into a succinct summary, you can do that in ten seconds on ChatGPT, so you don’t really need that skill anymore.
What it means and what the implications are of that is that AI is not nearly as good at. It’s not good at. In fact, they’re all predictive models. They’re not cause and effect and humans are amazing cause and effect machines. That’s a place where I’m like, “We could really do this.” I’m happy to get on a soapbox about this, but yeah, there are certain aspects of actual communication that are not replicable by computers.
They can replicate, but they can’t really get the full human experience. Sometimes, I joke that I think that one of the best places for folks to go to really understand the quality of people that they’re hiring or talking to, etc., is to actually talk to them because you can’t bring an AI into the room with you and it can’t talk for you. I really do think that folks who have communication skills, particularly spoken word communication skills, the ability to have a conversation, the ability to present information, the ability to on the fly process, synthesize, problem solve, and argue positively.
I don’t mean like a fight, but make a case for things, persuade, all of those things. Those, to me, are truly irreplaceable skills right now. I’m curious how many of those fall into that bucket that you identified earlier, things that you don’t think are taught either because I know they’re not taught outside of the humanities. It’s like, “What are we going to do?”
There’s a connection aspect to this, too. You gave a really good example at the beginning of your new book, Say What They Can’t Unhear, about the idea of sympathetic resonance. Can you maybe describe that a-ha moment for you and how it applies to communication?
The very brief context for how I stumbled across this in the first place. I was asked by a company I was working for at the time to bring an object that I felt was representative of me and what I did. I landed on a tuning fork. To me, this was like getting to that point of helping someone bring their message and or what they were trying to do in tune with who they were, but also the folks they were talking to and the outcomes they were trying to seek.
As I was just researching tuning forks, of all things, I discovered this thing called sympathetic resonance, which is if you have two tuning forks sitting on boxes that make their sound even louder, and those two tuning forks are tuned to the same note, let’s say the letter A or the note A. If you hit one of those tuning forks and then stop that same tuning fork, you touch it again and stop it from ringing, the other tuning fork will ring with that same tone, even though you never touched it.
When I first discovered that, that is, in my mind, the ideal form of communication, of persuasion, etc. It is a physical force in the sound wave, but without any visible touching, let’s put it that way. Something was transferred perfectly to somebody else and resonated so strongly that the other person, in this case, would start to take that idea on as their own and even start to share it with other people.
That’s why I opened the book with it. It still, to this day, remains my ideal when I enter any conversation or even when I’m working with my clients as to what are we trying to do, particularly since so much of the work that I do is in change communication. That, to me, is absolutely ideal for change communication because that’s representative of intrinsic motivation to act and not anything that’s consequences or extrinsically based.
Tamsen’s Work With Organizations And Individuals
Talk a little bit about how all of this does translate into the work that you do with organizations and individuals. What’s a typical project like that you get involved in?
I would say there are a couple of big categories of things. I tend to work with ideas that folks anticipate as being potentially disruptive in one way, either positively or negatively. Ideas that are either fundamentally new because they are new to the market. I work with a fair number of startup founders or new product arms within organizations to really introduce this fully new concept. How do you do that? How do you introduce a new idea to people who’ve never heard it before in a way that they can understand and ideally act on it?
I would say that the other big bucket of things that I work on is what leadership literature refers to as a strategic narrative. In other words, let us essentially tell you the strategy that we’re about to put into place and/or what the strategy of this organization is. That can range anywhere from describing it in a pitch deck if it’s a startup, all the way through a leader introducing their vision statement. Let’s say they’re a new leader coming in. What is that? I do a lot of work with those fundamentally first internal communications that end up having to go out.
Understanding The Four Audience Groups in Change Situations
When it comes to change situations that you were talking about a minute ago, and that’s really what your current book centers on, what’s different about those situations where you’re trying to make a case for change? What’s more or less important?
I think what’s more or less important is, first of all, being quite honest with yourself about whether or not you’re looking for action or for change. What I mean by that is two things. One, action or change, and whether or not you actually care about the intrinsic motivation. There are two big ifs, but they’re really important if you’re hoping for a change that lasts, if you’re hoping for a successful reorg, a successful merger, a successful introduction, etc.
The distinction I make between action and change is that action can happen once. You can make anybody act out of consequences or authority or force or whatever. That probably will blow back on you, but it’s probably not going to be repeatable, or at least there’s going to be a point at which it stops being as easy to do. Change, to me, is sustained action. This means that it is a repeated behavior, and what is repeating that behavior is the fact that it becomes an internally motivated thing for that person to do.
Change is sustained action. The thing that causes a repeated behavior becomes an internally motivated thing for a person to do. Share on XThey’re doing it because that is the thing that they actually want to do in and of itself, not because there are any consequences from doing it or not doing it. That’s how, for me, I really make that decision. I think that when we’re talking about change communications, it really does depend. As with anything I wrote in the book, if you’re not looking for long-term results or don’t care about getting people on board, I mean, I do, but if you don’t, probably not the book for you. I’ve spent the first part of my career in nonprofits and higher educational institutions, cultural institutions, and, generally, not a lot of resources.
It just made better economic sense to me to really figure out how I could invest time and effort so that we didn’t have to redo things, so that we were less likely to get churn, we were less likely to have to go get new people to be donors or to stay on staff or new customers or clients. Let’s get the right people in the first time and treat them well once they’re here. Hopefully, that will last. Generally, that’s what I’ve seen. That’s why I assembled all those principles and put them together in the book.
We’ll get to them in a second. Before that, you talk about four different groups, actives, ambivalent, indifferent, and antagonists, and they ultimately represent your audience that you’re trying to convince to make a change. Can you talk about a few differences and how you need to consider each of them?
There are a couple of ways to think about them, but I think one of the most useful things is to think in advance of the folks that you are presenting a change to and what your anticipated distribution is between those groups. Any group can become a member of any other group. That’s really important based on how that change is introduced. Before anybody hears anything, they’re likely going to be inclined to agree with you no matter what you say, either because of past experience or because of trust or because they’re just company men and women and others, and that’s it.
Those are your actives. They are actively in support of you. They may even become advocates where they are preaching beyond the choir on your behalf as well. There are going to be some folks, we all know them, who are just automatically against you, again, either because they haven’t had good experiences with you or with the organization, or they’ve been through that change in the past and it hasn’t gone well, or maybe they’re just cranky people. Those exist, too. Those folks are going to be, again, generally against you, particularly if they don’t know the whole story of what the change is, why you’ve reached that decision, and what your thoughts and reasoning are behind it.
It’s the two in the middle that I think are really interesting. You may not be able to tell them apart right from the beginning. However, I think a lot of people just would assume that they’re the same, that there is this indifference and their ambivalence, but there actually is a technical difference between the state of indifference and the state of ambivalence. The one thing that is different is the ambivalence actually care. The indifference don’t care. They’re not for you. They’re not against you. They’re just going to go along to get along. They don’t care.
It’s not that they’re not important because they can be turned into something else, but they’re really not motivated in any direction at all. The ambivalents are, in my mind, one of the most important groups. They may look indifferent. They may look flip-floppy. They may look wishy-washy. They may look like they keep going back and forth but that’s because they care equally. They potentially care equally about what the change would do and also what the change would undo.
I don’t think I use this in the book, but an example that I experienced in my own career. I was part of an organization, a small college, that, for its eventual survival, was going to have to merge with a larger institution. It eventually did, though not while I was there. I understood that. I totally believed it. I totally agreed with it. I totally agreed with the mission of the school and believed it should continue.
Also, I realized that there was really no way financially that the school was going to survive on its own, long-term without some magical bajillion-dollar donor. Yet, if we merge as a larger institution, we would be merging me right out of a job. That’s just an example where that thing could come up where, again, you can have somebody who’s deeply committed to the organization, but everybody’s also self-interested at the same time.
The ambivalents is important because they are actively looking for information to help them decide which way to go. They’re the ones that are most poised to join one of the other groups. Active or antagonist, they’re most poised to do one of those two things. I’ll come back to the insistence that any one of those groups can become any other group. The book is really designed to try to get as many people to active as possible, given the fact that we’re trying to appeal to how every human makes those kinds of internally driven decisions and trying to raise that probability.
I think it is those two middle groups. I think about the change efforts that I’ve been through over the course of my career. It’s the middle that kills you because one thing you can say about the antagonists, at least they’re showing up. They’ve got an opinion.
They know where they stand.
The group in the middle, obviously, you’ve got to sense out whether they’re ambivalent or indifferent, to use your words. The ones who you can’t even get to care, especially when something is going to happen almost no matter what, you would much rather that you get them to one side or the other, so you at least have them engaged in a discussion. It’s when they ignore you. This is what goes on in our electorate.
People who just don’t vote because they’re just like, “I just give up. I don’t know who to vote for.” That’s why we have voter turnout that never creeps above 70%, even in the best of cases in our national elections. You see that in the corporate world as well. The fact that you’ve got this group in the middle like you desperately need to stack the odds more in your favor, and you’ll have like 20% for you, 15% against you, and 65% sitting in the middle. You just have to move some of those people out of the middle, even if they end up moving initially to the antagonist thing, because at that point, you’ve at least got something to discuss.
Clarity and you understand who’s going to be with you as you make this change and who where it may make sense about why for them not to be so.
A lot of times, there’s a survival aspect to staying in the middle. People don’t really want to come out for or against it. They may actually privately have a view, but they don’t really share it. You could call them the closet actives or the closet antagonists. You have six categories in your book, but you’ve got a lot of people like that who are going to keep their powder dry and not be visibly committed one way or the other. They’re also really hard.
Importance Of Explaining The Why Behind Change
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this over the past couple of years, JR. There’s so much about this that when you step back and think about it would seem to be obvious and yet we don’t do it. One of the most obvious things that we don’t often do is just that even the highest level of explaining why we are engaged in a change in the first place. One of the things I often talk about when I’m delivering keynotes on this or if I’m working with my clients on this, they are not against all change.
That’s not true. Sometimes, people are like, “Everybody fears change.” Yes and no, because everything is changing all the time. There’s nothing that is the same or identical from day to day. In fact, I do a lot of work with research scientists and biomedical scientists in particular. One of the things I’ve learned from them is that change is proof of life. If you’re not changing, you’re literally not alive.
Change is proof of life. If you are not changing, you are not alive. Share on XWhat I’ve come to understand is that change aversion is really risk aversion. That perception of risk can come from all sorts of different places. I don’t want to be seen as for this or against this because I’m not sure what the consequences are going to be. I know what the consequences are going to be or I think I know what the consequences are going to be and I don’t like them. It can be from this perspective of I’ve got risk because I’m not sure I know what it is, I know why we’re doing it, I’m just not sure we, the organization, are capable of it or I am capable of it. There’s not this idea, this feeling of efficacy, either self or collective.
When we take and leave out the very simple step of saying why we’re taking a change or making a change or even considering a change, we immediately add to that perceived risk. It’s one of the reasons why not only do I fully agree with Simon Sinek that we need to find the why and articulate it, but as I make the point in the book, I think it’s as equally important also to explain the reasoning behind that. There’s that higher level of why. We’re going to do this because it will help us achieve the other thing, the outcome.
We’re going to do it this way, and then this is really what the book is advocating for, because we believe, or if you’re the leader, because I believe not just that it’s the right thing to do, but why do you believe it’s the right thing to do above and beyond that you believe it’s going to get the outcome. If you are, for instance, wanting to change a compensation model, and you are trying to reach folks that you haven’t previously been able to reach by doing more, let’s say, through social selling or something like that. If you just tell people, “We’re going to institute a social selling model, there you go. This is why we’re doing it. We’re going to do it so we can make more money.”
Some people might looking at it. I’m like, “Yeah.” That’s going to be like, “I don’t know how to do that. I’m not sure I’m going to succeed at it. You’re going to bring a lot more competition into this. I don’t move.” If that person says, “I believe that good selling skills are not dependent on where they happen. Second, the more people we can reach, the more people we can potentially have sales conversations with, which is why I want to do this so that we can make more money.”
At that point, now you understand a little bit more about the reasoning behind it and not data and the evidence shows or our competition is doing that, but the intuitively understandable reasons. It’s those reasons, particularly if they’re aligned, that people immediately feel like they reduce risk. Someone can see why it would work. If they don’t agree with those principles right up at the front, then you’ve got an opportunity to really address what some of those deeper disagreements and misalignments are at the beginning, not after something has failed because people have dug in their heels.
Your first principle is change is not just an action, but a reaction. You make the point that people are often reacting as much maybe more so to you than they are to the message or the change. I think, intuitively, that makes sense that people have to believe in you, but I think we often forget that part. We go right to the details of it. Maybe more the what, skip past the why, and also skip past the why even listen to me.
I would include in that, we skip to how are we going to message this, without realizing that we’re already sending a message every single day, all the time, with everything that we do, how we do it, everything that we say, regardless of how we say it. Just as a quick example. I remember I saw a colleague, a friend, and a fellow Thinkers50 on the radar. She’s on the Thinkers50 list. She posted something, and it was talking about AI implementation.
She was taking a poll, and she said, “What do we think is the most important element of success in implementing an AI digital transformation?” I don’t remember what all four were, but I remember the first two. One was messaging and training, and the second one was building confidence in self-efficacy. Basically, building people’s beliefs that they can do it and they can be helpful with it. I remember I responded to her. I know that you’re going to say this is number two, that it’s about building confidence.
Most people think of messaging as something that comes after everything’s already been decided. It’s a thing that marketing or comms or PR figures out. I said, “I don’t understand how you get to number two, which is building confidence, building self-advocacy without talking to people. Without that.” You know it when she turns around and announces, “We have to really communicate to people the X, Y, and Z.” I’m like, “That’s messaging. That is what we need to do.”
I see this with my clients of all types. This applies very much to branding, market positioning, pitching, and sales communications. A lot of times, we say, “What do I think people will like to hear? What do I think we should say around this?” The thing is, and I say this in the book, we are wildly attuned to intent in humans, and we’re also really good pattern recognizers.
If you, as the leader, are saying one thing, but your team’s entire history with you is essentially experiencing another, it really doesn’t matter what you say. It actually does matter because if those two things are at odds, you’re actually making all of it worse. It comes back to that question you asked me first, JR, about what’s the big thing to think about when it comes to change communications.
I say you have to decide whether you are communicating to get people to do this and not invoke the consequences of not doing it, which is, one, communication, or are you really trying to establish mutual understanding? That means that you are still, at some level, open to how it’s implemented, what the direction is, etc. because there may still be things that you don’t fully understand about what’s going on. Those are mutually exclusive. You can’t pretend that you’re going for mutual understanding when you’re just going for action and agreement. People will figure that out and it will really damage their trust in you and your authority, and it will really damage your ability to implement that change long-term.
In some ways, there’s a two-way street here that you talk about later in the book. It’s not only the person who’s delivering the message who is important, but the person who’s receiving the message is also important. You talk about the importance of connecting with their identity. That if you make it, it’s one thing to say, “Don’t be late for meetings.” It’s another thing to say, “Do you want to be the person who’s known for being late for meetings?” That may not be the best example, but if you try to connect to a person’s sense of identity, you talk about this notion that people want to be smart, capable, good and you’re pointing out that this is a way to be smart, capable, good and make it about their identity, it’s a much more powerful message.
One of the most important things to understand is that everybody wants to be seen that way. That is an ongoing thing, meaning they are going to believe, generally, that they are appearing that way until they are told otherwise. If they are revealed to be otherwise, or it becomes apparent to them that somebody doesn’t think that way about them or doesn’t perceive them to be smart, capable, or good, we’d like to think that that will motivate them to behave differently. It doesn’t. It actually motivates them to think differently about the person who they don’t perceive as thinking well of them.
It’s one of those things where it comes back really to what I was just saying, which is, if you want to address somebody’s lateness to a meeting, then it really starts with, “I observe that you’re coming late. I am not making any judgments about this but here’s my concern. People might have these feelings about you. Let’s talk about what’s happening. Is there something else going on?” Not, “If you do this, people will think badly of you, or they’re going to know you as the person who’s late.” It’s just, “This is what I observe. Here are the risks. I’m not saying that to you because I’m saying, or else. Let’s understand what’s going on.”
What’s interesting, and this is a fairly fresh area of my research, though the theories around it are longstanding, is that I think that in leadership and organizational communications in particular, this idea of establishing truly mutual understanding rather than just trying to use communications strategically towards a certain aim besides understanding. Understanding has not really played a role because if you think about for how long and in many organizations still is the dominant form of leadership is still command and control.
It feels almost antithetical to leadership to say I’m going to put myself out there and take the risk of saying, A, you may not agree with me, and B, by putting myself out there and saying, help me understand if you don’t agree with me, why not and you actually mean that. I think that’s scary for a lot of leaders but I think that’s where I’ve seen the work that I do with folks be really powerful, though.
The frameworks I’ve developed to support my work and the ideas I talk about in the book are really about helping individuals and organizations truly start with what they actually believe, not what they say they believe or wish they believe. It really is this excavation process of saying, “What is actually the thing that we’re trying to do?” We know what we’re doing, but then working with them to reverse engineer and saying, now explain to me, essentially in terms of, let’s call it a universal natural law, why you think that thing is going to achieve that outcome.
What’s really interesting about that is that it reveals in a very non-threatening way, I’m borrowing this phrase from the researchers Argers and Schoen, but what their values in use are, not what their espouse values are. Not what they aspirationally wish were true, but it helps to reveal what’s actually driving that decision. That could seem scary to folks, except that, again, part of the work is about establishing that from as bedrock a belief as possible. When you’re explaining it to somebody else, not only are they already familiar with that deeper concept, like we gave some examples earlier, but the more people we reach, the more potential customers we’re reaching.
That’s hard to argue with. In the context of growing a business or finding more of the right customers, we can see that. It allows there to be a really clear understanding and deep advocacy on the part of not just the leader, but often I’m working with the executive team on why that’s the case. It allows for when there is disagreement to be a lot more respectful because if someone says, “I understand that,” and this is the other concern that I have, not, “This is the right way. No, that’s the wrong way.”
It also makes it really clear when folks just may not be the best aligned for the organization. I say this all the time when I’m working with folks on sales conversations. If they don’t believe in the core principles upon which your approach is based, they’re not your clients and customers, and they never will be, not long-term. How much more time do you want to invest in them? Getting to yes is important, but so is getting to no.
I think that getting that surfaced as early as possible, in as clear a way as possible or really just saying, “Right there.” We’re almost drawing a map of it saying, “Right there, that’s the point where we disagree. Is there another place that we can get to the same place with a different agreement or do we need to go to a different place? Is this not the right collection of people?” There are a lot of options there, but I think a lot of times we discover those problems far too late. I hope that this is a way for folks to reveal them a lot earlier.
You talked earlier about belief being really important. Your last principle is there’s no such thing as believer’s remorse. If you can get people to really believe, it’s a lot different than just getting them to do it.
I mentioned this in the book, but Chris Voss, who was a former hostage negotiator, makes that distinction between someone saying you’re right versus that’s right, where that’s right is ideal because you’re right can just be like, “Yeah, whatever.” I love to up the stakes on that a little bit because when you can actually get someone to say not just, “That’s right,” but, “That’s true.” That’s true across circumstances, across contexts.
If you’re bringing that truth into play as part of your reasoning for something, it grounds it even more solidly in what people believe to be right in general, these more universal truths, depending on your beliefs, not everything is. It is agian about what’s true in this particular context. When more we can say, “That’s true,” the more people we reach, the more potential customers we’re reaching. It becomes hard for anybody at that point to unwind that truth.
We’re not doing it from a manipulation standpoint. We’re getting to a point where if there’s agreement with that conclusion that is the change, it’s because that person now believes in it as much as you do. What I talk about in the context of believer’s remorse is that it’s when we don’t regret the decisions that we believe are right. We may regret the impact. In principle, we believed it was right, but in practice, it may have fallen apart.
Okay, fine, but again, it’s how we are wired as humans that it really does come down to we don’t operate long-term outside of internal alignment with our own internal logic of what we believe to be true and what we believe to be right. The entire hypothesis of the book is that because every decision has this story behind it and because these decisions we make are based on beliefs that we already have, over time, the book is essentially saying the best way to get that buy-in for a change is to build a logical story on belief.
The best way to get the buy-in for a change is to build a logical story on belief. Share on XA belief-based argument about why that’s the case but not new beliefs. Really old ones. I think that’s where it takes a lot of how we typically think about “persuasion” and flips it on its head because it is about saying, let me create the conditions where if you agree, you will persuade yourself. If you don’t agree, we need to continue to have some conversations about what that understanding leads us to.
I think about the Ted Lasso show with the belief sign that he had above his office, which became so central to having the team come with him on the journey that he was trying to take them on.
Addressing Two Types Of Brain Processes In Communication
It wouldn’t have made for a very great show but what he didn’t explain very often was why he was doing certain things that way, which would oftentimes become revealed to people. The thing is that I say quite seriously that I have been focused for years on this idea of how do we accelerate the understanding and adoption of new ideas because, increasingly, leaders and organizations don’t have a lot of time. Whether that’s for attention reasons or whatever, fine.
Typically, there are two options open to us when we are trying to get people on board, trying to make a change, or making a transformational change happen. One is you make them do it, which means it’s extrinsically motivated, it’s based on consequences. Some people may go along, but they’re doing it because they have to, or they perceive they have to in some way. The second way is a typically very long, drawn-out process of mutual understanding over a series of conversations in weeks and months.
There just often isn’t that opportunity. A lot of my work is based on the idea that all of us have 2 brains or at least 2 brain processes loosely operating all the time. One’s very fast and one’s very slow. I would submit that the vast majority of how we have been making our case for change to date has been speaking to the slow brain, which is why it’s slow. That we’ve been speaking to the wrong part, or at least not as effective a part of the fast brain.
We’ve been speaking to the fear and shame and, “You’re going to get this,” or, “You’re not going to get this. You’re going to lose this if you don’t get that.” While that works in the short-term, it actually precludes rational decisions. Literally, that’s like you engage that part of the brain under those kinds of emotional states and it shuts down the ability to make rational choices.

Communicating For Impact: When you engage the part of your brain that makes rational choices with fear and shame, you shut down your ability to make the right decisions.
There is an aspect of the fast brain that we have underattended to and that is the intuitive part, the gut check part. It’s the gut-check part, not the emotional part, but the gut-check part. If I say something to you, whether you want to or not rationally or not, that fast brain is going, “Yes, I agree,” “No, I don’t,” without you going, “Let me assess what her very rational argument may or may not have been or what like it.” There’s a gut check on this. This is what I believe, and this is what my research is focusing on. I believe that this belief-based argument allows us to do.
It allows us to give the logical structure that actually both brains respond to because both brains respond to cause and effect, but because we’re using these intuitive, already in somebody’s belief system beliefs to create that argument, it allows that fast brain to give a gut check quick to say, “Yes, it make sense in principle.” Gut check. In principle makes sense. “Now, talk to me about the data. Now, talk to me about the evidence. Now, explain to me. Now that I’ve gotten this clearance from that fast brain, let’s go.” I’ve been testing this for two years. It does work a lot faster and a lot more durably but more to come on the empirical rigor behind that.
You did a lot of different things in the early part of your career. What do you feel like you really honed your own skills as a communicator and change agent?
How Tamsen Honed Her Skills As A Communicator
I mentioned this briefly in the book. I’ve been interested in change for a very long time. I had my first panic attack when I was 17 and I suffered with a pretty debilitating panic disorder until I was 34. I am no longer 34, which was many years ago. I was always interested in communication. Even in undergrad, I was interested in marketing, and market research, and then I was looking at it and saying, “We can’t convince a market if the internal organization isn’t convinced.”
When I got my MBA, it was in Organizational Behavior, focusing on Managerial Communications. My first job out of grad school was as a change management consultant. I was charged with coming up with the communications methodology. There were some other things that I did in between with working in the arts and nonprofit institutions that I was talking about. I would say that some of the most formative experiences that I had in both change and in communication on behalf were my two moonlighting jobs.
The first was, for thirteen years, I moonlighted as a Weight Watchers leader. Weight loss coach. I lost 50 pounds years ago and maintained it ever since. I wanted to pay that forward. For thirteen years, outside of my professional job in branding, marketing, and messaging, I helped other people achieve their weight goals. I collected a lot of, let’s call it ethnographic dataon what worked and what didn’t. I did the math over those thirteen years. It was 3,000 presentations. I got hundreds of people to their weight loss goals.
I think I had at least 10 people lose 100 pounds. Even as a part-time leader, I became one of the top 10% of the leaders as far as member success, member retention, etc. I believe that’s because I learned a lot. I don’t think I was a great leader in the beginning, but I learned a lot about what people needed to hear, what they did, and what they did not need to hear in order to make that change. That’s where a lot of these beliefs about if we’re actually looking for a change have to make internal sense at the gut level to someone about why they need to operate in a different way.
No amount of threat. The threat may get someone to start, but it’s not going to keep them going until something else shifts in their thinking to really have it be self-sustaining in a way that isn’t scary, painful, or shameful for them. That taught me a lot, and I would take those lessons and apply them to my day job.
A lot of times that meant turning conventional wisdom around marketing and sales messaging and branding completely on its head because I was like, “I am watching what you’re telling me to do not work at the individual level.” I don’t understand how it’s going to work at the market level if it doesn’t work one on one. Once we started to flip that in my jobs, I started to see dramatically different results in fundraising and when I was drawing audiences and attention and brand recognition.
The other one was the now 10 or 11 years that I spent working with one of the top-level TEDx organizations. That became formative because instead of being the person who eventually, intuitively, I was just like, “Do it this way, not this way, say it this and not that,” I needed to somehow transfer and reverse engineer what was in my head into a process or a framework that other people could follow and achieve the same results.
When I first came up with that years ago, that’s Find Your Red Thread, the first book, that actually taught me a lot about not just what was universally true about making these kinds of things happen. However, because TEDx talks are short, it really drove the how do we do this quickly? If you’ve only got 3 to 18 minutes, how do you do that? What I came up with that did that could not only work at 3 to 18 minutes, it could also work in 30 seconds or less to get that understanding and principle. There’s been a lot of stuff, but it’s been my moonlighting jobs that have actually been the most formative of what I do, how I do it, and why.
Now, your moonlighting job is getting a PhD.
Yeah, it’s an EDD. I also love that job. That’s also very formative. That’s actually being formative in its own way because I’ve spent a lot of time, particularly with TEDx and working with speakers and authors and academics, etc., on a different level. If folks oftentimes want to be thought leaders or even sometimes founders who want to be seen as thought leaders as ways to draw attention to their work or just even CEOs. To be in academia and understand where academia sets the bar for new ideas and what’s required for something to truly be considered new is eye-opening, but I think that can eventually translate out to other folks. Stay tuned. Yes, I’m also now moonlighting as a student.
Last question. You’ve done some different things in your career. What advice would you offer to somebody who’s reading to make the most out of their own career?
Advice For Making The Most Out Of Your Career
It may sound like a strange place to start, but this is inspired by, of all things, an essay I read once upon a time in a book called The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton. He may not have said it exactly this way, but what I took from it was really becoming clear about what question is it that you love to answer. He was talking about it in the context of when you go to a new place, what is the question that you’re trying to answer for yourself about that place? That can help guide what you go see and what you want the kinds of things that you look at. It could also indicate whether or not you actually even need a guidebook because those folks are often asking a different question.
That’s something I keep coming to. In fact, in my own work, this idea of what I call a core question has continued to remain. It was what I called the goal question with the red thread. It’s the same thing. It’s really saying to yourself, as I’ve said probably a couple of times now, that I have been trying to answer the question of how we accelerate the understanding and adoption of new ideas for 25 years. I can position everything I’ve ever done in the context of how it was helping me figure out aspects of that answer.
What is lovely about it is there is no end to that answer. It is yet a unifying direction. It gives my life a narrative. I believe that other folks do that. I would not have always called it that. I may not have always used those words. It’s taken the 25 years and being the age that I am to look back and say, even if you were for every position or even phase of your life to say, “What was I curious about? What was I trying to do? What was I trying to figure out?”
I think that what you start to see is you do start to see a pattern to it. As I said before, we humans operate on our own internal logic, but because so much of that logic is set by that fast brain, we’re often not aware of it until we actually put it in front of ourselves and we make it explicit in some way. When we do that, there’s a real opportunity to see how these things start to connect. There have been times I’ve used this approach to help people figure out how do they represent themselves even in job interviews. That has become really powerful.
I think that starting to think about what’s the question or what’s a set of questions that you have just really been, in one way or another, all about for years. Even if it’s in wildly different positions, it becomes a really focusing way for you not only to frame or reframe some of the things that have happened to you or that you’ve done in the past but sometimes even to give you guidance about where is it that might be even more useful for you or more interesting for you to go into the future.
A lot to think about there. Thank you for doing this. I appreciate it.
My pleasure, JR. Thank you so much.
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Thanks to Tamsen for joining me to discuss why communication is so important, her latest book, Say What They Can’t Hear, and a broader and varied career journey. If you’re ready to take control of your career, you can join the Pathwise community. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on the website for the Pathwise newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Thanks, have a great day.
Important Links
- Tamsen Webster
- Tamsen Webster on LinkedIn
- Find Your Red Thread: Make Your Big Ideas Irresistible
- Say What They Can’t Unhear: The 9 Principles of Lasting Change
- The Art of Travel
- PathWise on LinkedIn
- PathWise on Twitter
- PathWise on Facebook
- PathWise on YouTube
- PathWise on Instagram
About Tamsen Webster
Part keynote speaker, part message strategist, and full-time “Idea Whisperer”, Tamsen uses her proprietary Red Thread method to help audiences, organizations, and individuals build and tell the story of their big ideas. The result? Real, transformative change.
Tamsen’s own Red Thread is woven through more than 20 years as a brand and message strategist. She holds an MBA in Management Communications and Organizational Behavior, an MA in Arts Administration (Public Relations and Crisis Communications) and bachelor’s degrees in American Studies and Marketing—but Tamsen believes she learned the most about inspiring change in her 13 years as a Weight Watchers leader.
As Executive Producer of TEDx Cambridge, one of the largest and longest-running TEDx Talks in the world, Tamsen coached everyone from a 10-year old sartorialist to a pervasive roboticist to a bioethics pioneer to build their RedThreads™ into Ideas Worth Spreading.
Now she’s a globe-hopping keynote speaker on storytelling, branding, change management, and idea development, and a go-to consultant for enterprise companies like Verizon, Johnson & Johnson, and State Street Bank who want their big ideas to have an even bigger impact.
When she’s not in the spotlight—or helping others own theirs—Tamsen pursues (adequate!) ballroom dancing and runs the occasional (reluctant!) marathon. She lives in Boston with her fantastic other half, and two amazing boys with big ideas all their own.