In this gripping episode, Miroslav Bardovic, Founder of Enlivened Speaking Institute, shares how he teaches his clients how to go beyond didactic talking at people and how to deliver their message in an embodied way that is enlivening and engaging for audiences.
You will discover:
– What attunement must look like in the modern corporate landscape and why is it such an important skill for leaders today?
– How being lied to actually changes you physically
– Why we are experiencing a crisis of trust and what you can do to change it
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome, welcome once again, to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast, and here with us today is Miroslav Bardovic, who is a TEDx speaker, facilitator and best selling author, who’s worked with over 5000 people worldwide, supporting them to bring their message to the world. He’s the founder of the enlivened speaking Institute, where he teaches speakers to deliver their message with authenticity and connect with their audience. He has run training for globally renowned companies like Lululemon, Athletica, and delivered highly celebrated presentations for the professional speakers of Australia conference, and he’s here with us today. Well, Miroslav, I want to start off with something I’ve heard you talk about several times, and that is this idea of a crisis of trust. And I’ve run into it. I think just about everyone has run into it. Why is there such a big problem with trust in companies around the world today?
Miroslav Bardovic
I think one of the layers of it is that we feel to get ahead that comes through the seat of manipulation or getting on top of one another, as opposed to working collaboratively, uh, trusting that our deeper desires are what’s driving the force was, is what really matters. Now we’re getting really deep there, really quickly, but let’s, let’s go from this goal.
Scott Ritzheimer
I love this because I think an initial reaction by a number of people like, oh, I don’t try and manipulate people, right? So unpack that for us a little bit, because I’ve found sexually far more common than we give it credit. What does that look like? And maybe some of the more obvious ways, but also some of the more subtle ways.
Miroslav Bardovic
Yeah, well, let’s I was having a conversation recently about the topic of emotional intelligence, and the guy I was speaking to where we were unpacking from a very genuine place what emotional intelligence means to us. And it was like, for me, emotional intelligence means I can get what I want from someone else. Wow, if I’m intelligent enough, emotionally it means and there was no there was nothing wrong. It’s not like it was doing bad things with people, but it was like this was my edge, or way to get ahead in the world, because I had more emotional intelligence than someone else. And I was like, Whoa. That’s a completely different place to approach it than where emotional intelligence has lived inside me. It was a deeper intimate relationship to life and a deeper understanding to life. I never saw the spin on it. Of it was about getting what I want, and not that there’s anything wrong or bad with this. I think they’re just tools and essentially how we apply them all.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. And so one of the challenges with this, there’s a couple, one, is it can kind of become the water that we’re in. You ask a goldfish, you know, if they like the temperature of the water, and they’re like, what water, right? And so there’s a little bit of a lot of us have just become accustomed to this, as if it is the way that it should go. I remember being shocked once at some statistics that were done. It was a survey, basically asking folks how how trustworthy they thought other people are. And it was breaking it down by country. And while there were some changes country by country, the vast majority of the the vast majority of people thought to some degree, others were not trustworthy. Why? Why is it that we accept that?
Miroslav Bardovic
It’s a good question, and this, this is probably like what I’ve seen the research. Point to is this is a cultural determinant as well. Like different cultures have different relationships to trust, and primarily the Scandinavian countries have a much higher trust ratio with each other. I think like something like 60 ish, 60 to 70% of people will say that they trust other people, whereas in Latin America, I think that was down to like 30% or something like that, varying with countries as well. It’s not not a whole continent, but you know what? What it reminds me of is, I’ll share a little story. A few years ago, I had a client that called me to come and watch her presenting. She’s like, I’ll fly you in. I have two or three presentations over these days. Watch me give me your feedback, and I went along with her. Kind of got, you know, backstage pass. Saw all the stuff that was happening. I heard I had, like, two notes, two pages of notes, and she’s driving me to the airport at at the end of this. And she was like, Okay, so are you going to tell me anything? Like I’m holding the notes in my hand? She’s she’s driving. I was like, Look, I could give you all of these notes, but this is more or less going to be useless to you. I’m like, There’s one thing here that’s going to change all of this, and you’re probably not going to like it. She goes, Okay, only what is it? And I’m like, You have to stop gossiping about your clients. On some level, they can feel it. On some level, they’re not trusting you. They’re not opening to the depth you can because how the. Talking how you’re talking about them when they’re not in the room. And like, that’s not just an individual thing. She took that on, and she called me, I don’t know, maybe a month or two later, and she goes, Okay, I did what you said. The people I’ve been gossiping with didn’t like it. They’ve been used to us relating in a certain way, and some of them like it. It put a strain on our friendship for me to not engage that way anymore. But she’s like, the clients in my room started getting far deeper results. And I’m like, Yeah, because unconsciously now they can trust you, right? And they clients might not even have what we call emotional intelligence, but on some level, they respond to to that unseen layer of trust that is always there between us and you know, when we go into like to buy a car or a house or something, certain times we just go, I don’t know why. I just don’t trust that person. And psychologically, we can’t pick up what it is. But for me, trust is this unseen quality that that, as Stephen Covey talks about, it’s like it changes speed and the changes cost. The more you slow things down, the more it costs you into the long run.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah, there’s some something that’s remarkable about that is one we all know what that feels like. Very few of us could articulate it right and and even fewer of us would articulate it to the person who was doing it right, especially in a relationship like that, a client’s not going to say, hey, this makes me not trust you, right? There’s so many degrees of there’s so many things that would have to align for that to happen. Can it happen? Yes. Does it happen? Not. Typically so. One of the things is just the role of an outsider, of a coach, being able to bring that perspective and give voice to what was going on, because that would not show up in any feedback. You know, the most modalities you would you would give it’s fascinating. The other one is just how important trust is. And you talk about this idea of rapid trust, and that challenged me the first couple times I heard you reference it, because it’s like, man, does the trust take time? Does trust take time? And if so, what is rapid trust?
Miroslav Bardovic
I think there’s two variables here. Yes, trust takes time, and there’s three variables that I speak about. There’s authenticity, alignment, and I’ve gone blank, but basically the one I want to speak about is alignment. The more deeply we know ourselves and the more deeply we can communicate from that place, the more trust we’re going to create in less time. Whereas if I’ve done, let’s say, let’s say I’m someone that’s done a lot of NLP, and I get all the techniques, and I’m just mentally running in my world and doing the technique thing. It’s the trust there is going to be very shallow. I might get my way in the world. I might hustle my way for a lot of things, but it’s almost impossible to create the deep trust, because I’m not allowing myself to go to the depth of who I am or what’s possible for me. Yeah, so it’s like it takes this reflective quality of continually being in relationship with who am I, what am I feeling? What are my desires in this situation? And the difference is, if you can communicate from a place of desire, it’s going to create a lot more trust. And if you’re trying to manipulate someone else to meet your desires, but often it takes more courage to to work from the place of desire than it does to, you know, to do the whole merry go round thing. So these are some, I guess, very basic ways. But the third one is attunement. And I think this is massive as well, and creates so much trust. So it’s one thing, if I’m aligned and I have the authenticity to communicate that, then it’s a whole different layer of trust that’s created. If I can attune to the person I’m speaking to, relate to where they’re at and how they’re receiving things and what they’re able to hear and ready to hear, and how they’re receiving the information as they hear it. Yeah, now if I can modulate the way I’m communicating based on where that other person is at, it’s going to create a rapidly, deeper, faster, more amount of trust than if I just speak to every person as if they’re the same.
Scott Ritzheimer
I had a I had a real struggle with this early on as a leader, and I cannot remember where I came across it, but I it was probably looking through like different leadership styles or personality styles, where it first started to emerge for me, and I realized that has flawed as many of those systems are they? They were at times indicative of how someone communicated, or how I could more effectively communicate with them. And one of the things that I learned was it was more valuable to speak the language of your audience than your natural tongue, right? And and so I love that you brought us back to attunement, because I actually had a question for you there. We’ve had folks who’ve talked about authenticity. I think we hear about that a lot alignment. We’ve talked about that kind of individually and organizationally on the show, but we’ve really never dialed in on attunement. Well, what would you say that attunement looks like in kind of the modern corporate landscape, and why do you feel like it’s it’s such an important skill today?
Miroslav Bardovic
Yeah, it’s a good question. So let’s start off a little piece of research. This came out of Stanford, and what they basically found is, I’m going to. Give you the very Britt version. If two people were speaking and one of them was lying to the other person, the person who was lying had their biomarkers go up. Now that’s not new. If you’ve lied to your parents, you know your heartbeat starts racing, right? What they found fascinating, though, is the person that was being lied to also had a lift in their own biomarkers. So on some level, the body of the person we’re trying to deceive when we’re lying. And lying can be half truths, like we we lose trust, even when we tell small lies a lot of the time. So this, for me, was firstly fascinating how deeply we are connected on an unconscious level. That’s kind of talking beneath our beneath our minds all the time. Our bodies are responding to to safety, essentially, and safety and trust are very synonymous to each other. So attunement for me is, can I be in relationship to the experience someone else is having in this moment? And if I can, it completely changes things like in a sales environment, it’s like I’m aware of subtleties that maybe not even the other person is aware of for themselves, and I can speak to those subtleties. And if I do that, it creates rapid trust, because it’s like, Oh, this guy isn’t just trying to push a sale. He actually cares about what’s going on for me.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, and I love where this is in the context of the conversation, especially because we’re talking about using it to gain rapid trust, not to like we opened up with earlier of saying, hey, emotional intelligence is to get what I want from people. Lots of folks who are attuned can play other folks, but using that as a strength, not to get what you want necessarily, but to to connect with the people you are are working with. I think is so important. I love that. I love that. So I got a question for you. I ask all my guests the same question. I’m very interested to hear what you have to say. Are you ready? All right, here we go. Here we go. So what would you say is the biggest secret you wish wasn’t a secret at all. What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Miroslav Bardovic
Well that’s a great question. Can we go completely off the script? Yes, I wish we accepted energy wasn’t the woo, woo thing, and started relating to the unseen forces at play between human beings and perhaps energy, what we call energy is just an expression of our unexpressed mental and emotional needs. I expressed and unexpressed, and it’s just about being more attuned to each other. And we can call it anything. We can just call it the unseen, the unhealthy, but when we start relating to it has a very real and obvious effect in our lives.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love changing the labels around that, because I do think that energy comes with so much weight to it, but the reality of it is, in the study you just referenced is proof of concept, but there’s so much going on below what’s being said. I go all the way back to your story about the trust that was being torn down by gossa Being from client to client, right? That nobody would necessarily even be conscious of there’s so much more going on, and to throw the baby out with the proverbial bathwater, I don’t think is a disservice to any of us. So I love that. I couldn’t agree more. I think it’s fantastic now, Mirro, there are some folks listening to this. We’ve only scratched the surface of of your work, and they want to know more. They want to hear more from you. Where can they find you and hear more?
Miroslav Bardovic
You can connect directly. LinkedIn is probably the best place. Miroslav Bardovic, my website, Miroslav, it’s a Miroslav p at the moment, but it will be Miroslav B. Miroslav Bardovic as well. That’s, that’s probably the easiest two places to connect. Yeah.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic. Well, we’ll get everybody there. We’ll get the URLs in the show notes for anyone who’s listening. Go ahead and just jump over there. Check it out. There’s a ton of great resources. You will not be disappointed. Miroslav, thanks so much for being on the show. It’s just a privilege and an honor having you here. Thank you for opening up right out of the gate and taking us deep in such a short period of time. Remarkable. Really appreciate it. And for those of you, for those of you watching and listening, you know your time and attention mean the world to us, I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Miroslav Bardovic
Miroslav Bardovic is a TEDx speaker, facilitator, and best-selling author who has worked with over 5,000 people worldwide, supporting them to bring their message to the world. He is the founder of the Enlivened Speaking Institute, where he teaches speakers to deliver their message with authenticity and connect with their audience. He has run training for globally renowned companies like Lululemon Athletica and delivered highly celebrated presentations for the Professional Speakers of Australia Conference.
Want to learn more about Miroslav Bardovic’s? Check out his website at https://miroslavbardovic.com/ or connect with him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/themiroslavpetrovic/
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