This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - 170 / Good Awkward with Henna Pryor

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

(To take advantage of the FREE opportunity to give and get support on social media thru 12/31 click here: https://nicolekalil.com/apply and make sure to choose the “Likes Only” option) What do we do with all of our awkward parts and our not-so-epic moments? I know we’ve been taught to avoid and ignore them, but what would happen if we accepted them? Even better, what if we embraced them? WHAT IF awkwardness is our secret weapon for risk-taking, especially at work, as our guest today suggests? Well friends, I don’t know, but we’re about to find out. Henna Pryor is here to help us embrace the embarrassing and celebrate the cringe, so we can become our best and bravest. Henna is a highly sought-after Workplace Performance Expert, an award-winning 2x TEDx and global keynote speaker, executive coach, and author of the critically acclaimed book Good Awkward. Known for her science-backed approach to improving the performance, habits, and actions of hungry high achievers – in her fun, no-nonsense, no-jargon way – she believes that the key to most people’s success is leaning into awkwardness a little bit longer. What would be possible for you, for us, if we began to see the things that make us awkward as our superpowers? What if we appreciated and celebrated other people’s awkwardness?  What would happen if we just said “well’ THAT was awkward” and moved forward with our lives?  Awkward: it’s what makes us human and connects us in empathy (and humor too)! Awkward and upward, my friends! Like what you heard? Please rate and review  Connect with Henna and Resources: Website: www.hennapryor.com  Get her book Good Awkward: https://www.amazon.com/Good-Awkward-Embrace-Embarrassing-Celebrate/dp/1646871456/ Free intro chapter download at www.pryoritygroup.com/free-chapter Follow Henna on IG: @hennapryor

we've kicked off AmpliShip, which is the public support of women on social media by creating a way to find and like each other's content. It's been uplifting, inspiring, and impactful, and you can join us for free from now until the end of December. All you need to do is click the link in show notes or head to my website, NicoleKhalil.com, click on the AmpliShip tab and apply. Make sure you check the likes only option and you will be added for free. It's a small and important way to start practicing AmpliShip

because you get support and you give support. It's time for you to join the social media engagement party. I am Nicole Kalil, your host of This Is Woman's Work, the podcast that's redefining gender expectations so we can all be and become who we're meant to and do whatever it is that lights us up from the inside. And while that is wildly important, I think it's necessary that I acknowledge that the road to this goal, to this aspiration, has been and will continue to be filled with failures, mistakes, messiness, some fear, lots of doubts and pivots, and countless amounts of awkward moments. At least that's what the road

has looked like for me. I mean, I never have really felt like I fit in anywhere. I always seem to be too much of this and not enough of that. Often one of the only women in the room, for a very long time, one of the few single people in the room, and now the not at all typical spouse and mom in the room. An introvert choosing to show up in ways and places extroverts are expected. Too willing to question the status quo, far too willing to rant, a little too direct, prone to overthinking, a know-it-all when I'm feeling insecure, tragically bad at small talk, and a combination of no filter and a little too honest, all of these things and more have created oh so many cringeworthy, foot-in-mouth, wildly uncomfortable, at least for me, moments of awkwardness. You know those times

where you wish the floor would open up and swallow you whole so you could escape the awkwardness? Yeah, I know all about those moments. And they often happen at the wrong time with the wrong people. For me, it's often in conversations with men in positions of power who are making decisions about me and my work opportunities. Yep, you guessed it, awkward. In social settings where I'm meeting multiple people for the first time, super awkward. And at times where I forget my filter and say something far too directly to someone who's not at all prepared. Oh my God, so awkward. So what do we do with all of our awkward parts and moments? I know we've been taught to avoid and ignore them, but what would happen if we accepted them?

Even better, what if we embraced them? What if awkwardness is our secret weapon for risk-taking, especially at work, as our guest today suggests? Well, friends, I don't know, but we are about to find out. Hannah Pryor is here to help us embrace the embarrassing and celebrate the cringe in order for us to become our best and bravest. Hena is a highly sought after workplace performance expert, an award-winning two times TEDx and global keynote speaker, professional executive coach, and author of the book, Good Awkward. Known for her science-backed approach to improving the performance habits and actions of hungry high achievers, we know a lot about them, in her fun, no-nonsense, no-jargon way, she believes the key to most people's success is leaning into awkwardness a little bit longer. Hannah, thank you so much for being here today. I'm so excited for the first time ever

to talk about awkward. I am so thrilled to be here. And what I love most is you've described the experience of I think 99% of us. So yes, here for this conversation. Yay, I love it. Okay, I'm glad it's not just me. So what, I wanna start by asking,

what does good awkward mean? Great starting point. So what does by asking, what does good awkward mean? Great starting point. So what does it mean to embrace the good awkward or embody the good awkward? Most of the time when we hear the word awkward, we don't have a positive association. We think this is an emotion that I'd rather not feel. This is a trait I use to describe myself or a characteristic of myself that I'd rather not talk about or that I'm not particularly proud of. And what the research uncovers, and I think what most of us experience, is that awkwardness

is an unavoidable daily part of life. Awkwardness lives in uncertainty. And it's the emotion that we feel when the person that we believe ourselves to be or our true self is momentarily at odds with the person that someone else sees on display. In other words, our internal identity for a moment does not match their external reality. And in that gap space, we feel the emotion of awkwardness. Now, bad awkward is what we feel when we do have that discomfort.

We do have that cringe, but that situation is so paralyzing or takes us over so wholly that it stops us from raising our hand in the next meeting or speaking up in the conversation when we want to, or taking the risk or taking the chance. When we talk about good awkward, it's building awareness around the emotion, building conditioning of social muscles that in this current era that we live in, aren't easily conditioned because we live in a society that makes it very difficult. And recognizing that within awkwardness within that space is attention that actually, when we lean into it helps us pursue our wildest, most audacious dreams. Leaning into the good awkward is how we move into that growth and that courage that many of us get stuck to figure out what's getting in the way of it.

Okay. So I love the distinction, at least from what I'm hearing. Bad awkward paralyzes us. It has us stop or regress or whatever. Whereas good awkward, there is an element of forward momentum or action that sort of results from it. I also kind of, correct me if I'm wrong, it feels like good awkward, that gap between what's internally true for us versus other people's expectations. Some of that might be about other people's expectations,

not necessarily about who we are or what's true and real for us. Okay, so would you mind giving maybe a couple of examples, either personal or some that you mentioned in the book? There are some good ones in there. Yeah, absolutely. I love what you said, and I'll just highlight, you're right about the emotion of awkwardness having a lot to do with expectations. So I mentioned quickly that awkwardness lives in uncertainty, right? We experience the emotion of awkwardness when we

feel uncertain about how someone is going to respond, how something is going to go, something happened that we didn't expect, and now we're not sure how people are going to react. And so as it relates to the examples that I would say stuck with me most acutely, now I can give you a thousand examples of times I experienced awkwardness, but I'll just give you one of my favorites from the book. And it relates to this idea of expectation management. So after the pandemic, one thing that even extroverts started to notice was that our social muscles had weakened. So this isn't just something for introverts. Extroverts felt it too, especially after we went into isolation. So I remember going into one of my first in-person client meetings that I hadn't seen this guy or frankly, any client in a number of months or over a year at this point.

And I was trying to pitch a large scale training project. So I was meeting with this director and I, you know, I like to think I'm pretty good at pitching sales pitching. I gave him 15 minutes of my finest sales pitching. And I'm thinking to myself, you know, Hannah, you're crushing it. You're killing it in this. And he puts his hand up in front of his face. So those who can't see me, I'll describe, he puts his hand up, you know, right in front of his body. And I'm thinking to myself, hell yeah. Right. So I give him this boisterous high five because I, because I just, I just crushed it. And he literally stops deadpan. His face kind of falls and he goes, and I was putting my hand up because I was trying to tell

you to stop. And I was like, oh my God. Like, did you forget how to people? You couldn't, you couldn't, you couldn't read that cue. And so again, the emotion of awkwardness, there's two things that at play here. One is the person I believe myself to be someone who's pretty good at sales pitching and someone who can read people is suddenly at odds with this person who felt like they were on display. And to your earlier point, the expectation I had of what he was doing, how that conversation was going, wasn't met. And all of a sudden that uncertainty became so acute in that social situation that embarrassment, cringe, awkwardness just washed over me. And, you know, in some cases that can be something fleeting. And in other cases for people that can stick with you in the shower, that can stick with

you in the car, that can stick with you for days. And so it's learning how to embrace that moment that is really critical to our learning. Yeah. I mean, I find, especially my most cringe worthy experiences, I do replay them over and over in my mind. But the come from is like, what can I learn from this? What was going on? How do I apply that going forward? And I think that that helps me to move forward as opposed to getting stuck. what are some tips or advice when you find yourself in these inevitable awkward moments? Like what did you do after the high five? Any tips for that? Of course. Yeah. So, you know, there's, there's two categories of awkward moments. I would say there's awkward moments in life's unplanned moments. So we're going to have some as humans, we're going to trip over the crack in the sidewalk. We're going to sing the song lyric wrong because we didn't realize we're going

to mispronounce someone's name. None of going to sing the song lyric wrong because we didn't realize we're going to mispronounce someone's name. None of us really planned for those. Those just occur. And then there's awkwardness that exists in life's planned moments. We tried something. We raised our hand to speak up and our contribution landed with a thud, right? Both of them have that uncertainty in common.

But in those moments, when you find yourself in one of those moments, there's a number of things you can do. I'll give you my favorite couple of strategies. Number one is ironically, the avoidance of awkwardness increases awkwardness. So one of the most powerful things you can do is out of the gate, name it, just name it. And in fact, in this situation, that's exactly what I did. I, you know, did the high five. He says, Hey, I was trying to tell you to stop. And after, you know, of course, a momentary flush in the face and my body going a little hot, I said to him just out of the gate, that's really embarrassing. I totally misread that I'm pretty mortified right now. Uh, thank you for being kind to me. And he relaxed. We both laughed, our shoulders dropped, right?

Had we stayed in that awkwardness, it actually would have made it worse for all parties involved. But by naming it, ironically, it reduces its power. So naming it as number one. Number two is learning how to strategically use humor where appropriate. A lot of times people don't realize that when humor is used in a strategic way, especially in awkward situations, it can not only diffuse the situation more quickly, but it also creates instant connection in the room. It creates instant psychological safety because again, no one is immune to this. The most confident people, you know, have stepped in it, have said something that didn't land, have put their foot in their mouth. And so it's very, very humanizing. And the third thing I would recommend is just mental preparation. You know,

part of what this work is about is not waiting until the awkward moment arises to know what to do in it. There are so many little life moments, both at work and in life where you can practice keeping the social muscles stronger. Example, we all order our restaurant takeout on DoorDash now or on ToastTab. If one of those is not working that day, call the restaurant, right? Next time I drop off my 13-year-old to her friend's house, I'm encouraging her, please go to the door and ring the doorbell instead of just texting here from the driveway, right? So many little things we can do

to keep our social musculature strong, but essentially what that's doing is creating these little daily social interactions that help us get that practice we need to know how to respond to any situation in the moment. It's when we lose the practice that we're unable to call on our humor or naming it in the moment

because we're so unskilled in doing it anymore. Yeah. I would add for me too, this is really speaking to me about the mental preparation is I love the idea of all of us putting ourselves out there a little bit more for the potential and possibility and being mindful. Like what you're saying earlier is like, I don't plan to be awkward, but there are a lot of situations that I put myself in on a regular enough basis that I know what types of awkward

are most likely. So for example, you know, we speak, it is highly likely that I'm going to have a moment where the words don't come out right. Like I need to be prepared for that. So I often say I've either had too much or not enough coffee. Let me do that one over. Right. Like and it's it's just knowing that it's bound to happen and it's bound to make me feel awkward. But that naming it humor and being prepared for those moments and not putting so much

judgment on them. I learned that so much from my sister, who's one of the people who just doesn't take life so seriously and laughs at herself all the time, where I used to try to cover it up or pretend the awkwardness didn't happen, which of course made it significantly more awkward. So I love it.

Name it, use humor, mental preparation. Yeah, and I wanna just honor something that you said, because I think a lot of people get very nervous when they hear the word awkward because they confuse awkwardness with ineptitude, right? If I'm stumbling over my words, Nicole, I'm, you know, I'm a podcaster. I shouldn't be stumbling over my words, right? We confuse awkwardness with ineptitude, but here's the research. The research actually says, if you are generally someone who is perceived as smart, competent, and capable, that the occasional flub, the occasional falling all over your words actually does not make us think, God, how is Nicole a podcaster?

In fact, to the contrary, we're like, oh, that's nice. She's human. How refreshing, right? It actually knocks people off of the pedestal and it puts the person they're talking to, in this case, me, at ease. Your lack of perfection puts me at ease. And so I love that your sister models this. And it reminds me of one of my favorite mantras, which is you can take the work seriously, but you don't have to take yourself so seriously. And I think embracing our awkwardness really speaks to that

idea. I love all of that. And one of the things I love about your book and your work is it is based in research. So what is the most interesting piece of research you found when looking into the emotion or experience of awkwardness? Yeah, my favorite piece of research from the book was around the phenomenon of something called vicarious embarrassment. And this was something I had no idea existed. And once I found this research and started sharing it with others, people were like, oh, that's what that is. And so vicarious embarrassment is a phenomenon that essentially means rather than just being embarrassed for someone else, when we see someone else embarrass themselves or have an awkward moment,

rather than feeling embarrassed for them, we literally feel embarrassed with them. So vicarious embarrassment for folks that experience it, it's actually a function of people who are high on a certain type of empathy. So people who are a little higher on this particular type of empathy, it's called easily empathetically embarrassed. Not only do they feel embarrassed for other people, they feel embarrassed with other people. higher on this particular type of empathy. It's called easily empathetically embarrassed. Not only do they feel embarrassed for other people, they feel embarrassed with other people. So I'll give you a quick example. Let's say, you know, Nicole, you and I are in an office,

you are giving a presentation and you brutally mispronounce someone's name, right? And I'm sitting here in the chair going, oh my God, this is so uncomfortable, right? I am feeling that pain, not just for you, but I'm literally taking it on myself going, I'm not going to get up there. God, what if I mispronounce someone's name? But here's the twist in that context. Maybe you have no idea that you mispronounce that person's name and maybe nobody else in the room does either. So in that context, I'm not embarrassed for you as a form of helpful empathy. I'm actually embarrassed taking it on with you. I'm actually taking on that emotion that you're not even feeling. And so in that context, it's useful to examine how prone are we to being embarrassed with other people, even sometimes that they're not even aware of it. Because the

problem is when we do that too often, it becomes a sneaky little source of judgment because it makes us less likely to get in front of the room and make the presentation, to get in front of the room and try to pronounce someone's name because we're always operating from the assumption that people are going to look at us like that, which is not categorically true. People are not looking at us with that level of intensity. They are not typically feeling that full body embarrassment on our behalf. So we just have to be mindful of how our empathy,

which is a superpower, don't get me wrong, but how that certain type of empathy can get us in trouble as it relates to embracing our awkwardness and taking more risks. Okay, so that is fascinating. And I'm really trying to reflect. I can very vividly remember feeling embarrassed with somebody like that. Oh my God. Like the, I want the earth to open up and swallow us both because I don't think I was conscious to that. But I do know that it has triggered judgment. That's just a default for me that I always have to be mindful of. I believe that judgment derails our confidence. And so it's one of these things that it's something I just need to be hyper aware of. But I find that fascinating. Okay. So good to know that not everybody feels that way. And then I said this earlier in our time together, specifically professionally,

specifically at work, what is the importance of leaning into awkwardness as it relates to being willing to take risks? Yeah. The difference that most people try to reconcile is, or the paradox rather, that most people try to reconcile is, or the paradox rather, that most people try to reconcile is when I stop feeling awkward, I will feel more confident, right? Or if I'm confident enough, I won't feel awkward anymore. And I immediately want to just pop that bubble and say, it doesn't work like that. Because here's what happens. Awkwardness, again, it exists in uncertainty. And every time

you are trying to grow professionally a little bit, whether that is taking a new job, whether that is joining a new team, whether that's moving laterally in the company, whether that's raising your hand in a meeting, whether that's negotiating for your salary promotion, we can go on and on. At every inflection point, at every transition point in your career, when you are trying to move into a slightly bigger playing field, you are going to invite the emotion of awkwardness because that inherently is a moment where things feel a bit more uncertain. And so trying to avoid it, trying to eliminate it, frankly, is a fool's errand. It's an uphill battle that you will never win. And so rather than trying to do so, your energy is better spent understanding what that emotion

represents to you. So spoiler, awkwardness as a social emotion is tied to approval, right? It is tied to our desire to belong, social acceptance, et cetera. What are the stories that you have around that, that you can potentially spend some time ahead unpacking? And then kind of what we started to talk about before is putting in the reps, conditioning. If you can get comfortable in uncertain conversations, socially uncertain negotiations in smaller stakes moments, you will have the necessary muscle mindset and social muscle to take into any of those uncertain

inflection points at work. But when we don't have the awareness and the reps early in small stakes moments, those big moments at work where we want to speak up on behalf of a marginalized team member, when we want to negotiate our salary, when we want to put our name in for the big new job, feel like extra Herculean lifts because these muscles have not done any lifting. And again, increasingly the society we live in, there's not as many opportunities to naturally do that. We now need to find opportunities to do that. So all of this really aligns with what I've uncovered

and discovered about building confidence as well. I think especially women, we have this tendency to believe that at some point we'll feel ready for these big moments or these big risks or whatever. And the reality is confidence isn't built in the waiting to feel ready moments. It's built in the uncertainty, the discomfort and the awkwardness moments. So like, I believe at my core, everything that you're saying. And one of the chapters in your book is called embracing the suck. And I often talk about that too. Like it doesn't

suck any less when you're in the moment, it still is uncomfortable and painful and all of that. And somewhere knowing that there is another side to this, You'll get there. And the deep rooted belief that this is actually happening for you, not just to you. So talk to us a little bit about embracing the suck. Yes. And I think there's plenty of disciplines. In the military, they use language like this. I know our Queen Brene Brown uses language about embracing the suck. And then the way I think about it is I use it as an acronym, which is any muscle worth strengthening, any skill worth building. I do believe awkward tolerance is a skill that we need to build requires having intentional steps and a measured approach and

embracing the suck in this context is one of them. So suck again is an acronym. It stands for first starting with the small. You do not need to practice, you know, strengthening your awkward muscle in a huge stakes promotion conversation. Can you find smaller stakes opportunities to, let's say, speaking your value into the room or taking credit for a project is uncomfortable and awkward for you. Can you start with a few select peers, right? How do we start small to start to understand that this is the equivalent of repetitions in the mental gym? How do we start to do this in small stakes situations? But small alone isn't quite enough. It has to still be a little bit uncomfortable.

So if you're comfortable with these two best friends that you have at work having this conversation, how can we raise the stakes a tiny bit? Maybe there's some colleagues cross departmentally, maybe you could call in someone from your network to talk to you about it that you haven't talked to in a while. So that's raising the stakes a little, but then the next phase of raising the stakes, the C stands for what I call cringe chasm moments. So these are these moments where the threat of feeling so socially unsteady starts to throw you off balance. So I'll give you an example. I was working with a female leader the other day who was trying desperately. She's actually a chief

people officer, very bright, very high level. And she got some visibility because she's a people officer into everyone's salary in the C-suite. And she noticed she was the lowest by far, even though she was in the C-suite. So she said, I hate this. I feel very awkward about this, but I have to have this conversation. And so she started to plant seeds with some people she trusted and, you know, kind of get a little noisy in a small circle. Those were her small, uncomfortable, but her cringe chasm moment was when she finally went to the leader that could make this decision, made her case. And then she stopped by saying, what are your concerns? And then she held that silence. She didn't fill it with anything else. She made her case. And then

she said, and so what are your concerns? And she said, Hannah, my entire body was on fire. Like I just wanted to fill the space. But that was her cringe chasm moment. That was that moment that she decided that the other person's approval was less important to her than her own improvement, her own development. And so it's finding those moments to occasionally cross the chasm. But here's the difference.

It's not about outcome. Ideally, she would have won her case. In this case, she did. But it's not about celebrating that. She was celebrating the fact that she did it. Yeah. She went to bat. She stood there and she held it.

That was her cringe chasm moment. So small, uncomfortable, cringe chasm moments. And then the K just stands for keeping perspective, because ultimately, here's how we all feel about awkward moments. We obsess over them. We think everyone is paying such close attention to us. They're all staring at us. They think we're idiots.

But Tom Gilovich out of Cornell refers to the spotlight effect. People aren't paying as close attention to us as we think they are. They're more focused on themselves and whether people approve of them and whether they look awkward right now. And so it's just really useful perspective as we're doing this to remember that we are not the center of everyone's world. And the sooner we remember that, the better it is. So I'm so glad you went through that and the example because that acronym for SUCC is so powerful.

So start small stakes, get in that uncomfortable place, the cringe chasm moments and keeping perspective. Did I get that right? Yep. Correct. And thank you for reminding us that nobody is paying attention to us and our cringe worthy moments at the level that we are, or even that we think they are. We're all busy and we have our own shit. And so like, it's just not as prevalent. I also so appreciate you saying that it was that she put herself out there and asked and went through the uncomfortable and stood up for herself, the point of pride that it gets created when we speak our truth or do something like that. I think so often we tie the good to the outcome as opposed to the action. And that also really resonates with me. Hannah, I have so many other questions I could ask you,

but we are running at time. Let me just end with this last question. What are the costs of not embracing our awkwardness in our careers and at work. Yeah, significant and many, but I will say that the biggest is that for high performers, chasing social approval is a target that will constantly move and a race that we will never win. And I know people know that intuitively, but it becomes all the more challenging as we move further up the ranks, as we, you know, kind of in this last decade of adjusted our working styles, we're all trying to figure out where we fit in. And generally there's a danger to us looking for who we are through the lens of who other people see and do they like what they see? So the sooner we can put ourselves in these situations of

creating social musculature, and it can, again, it can be in bite-sized doses. So if you're, you know, a woman who works hybrid schedule or works remotely, and you don't get to rub shoulders with your colleagues often, that's okay. You can practice this at the cafe, at the coffee shop. You can just, just today, when you go to the grocery store, rather than looking at your phone when you're in line, strike up a little conversation with the person in front of you if they catch your eye, right?

These are things we've gotten so away from, but what we don't recognize is when we don't practice in these small stakes moments, the tough social conversations professionally become that much more difficult, that much more out of reach. So sounds simple, but we've gotten away from it. So I want you to over-index on being intentional.

If you want to build awkward tolerance, start today, one conversation at a time. I love that. Thank you so much, Hena. And if you are listening, absolutely go to henaprior.com. Go to goodawkward.com to get your hands on the book. We'll put the link to purchase the book and show notes, uh, as well as other ways to find and follow henna. Thank you.

This is such an important and such a good conversation. So much fun. Thank you. Okay. Friends, what would be possible for you for us? If we began to see the things that make us awkward as our superpowers? What if we reminded ourselves that there is such a thing as good awkward? What if we appreciated and celebrated other people's awkward? And what if that is what we have in common? What if it makes

us all human and connects us in empathy and in humor? What would happen if we just said, well, that was awkward and move forward with our lives? I think I have a new motto for my life and my work. I came, I saw, I made it awkward. How about you? How will you practice being your best, bravest and most awkward self? Awkward and upward, as Hannah says. Now that's what I call woman's work.