There's a moment in every professional's life when success starts to feel heavy.
You've checked all the boxes, hit all the milestones, and yet something's still missing.
That's when Dori Clark's message really starts to land.
She's recognized as the number one communication coach in the world, a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author and teaches executive education at Columbia Business School.
Dory is also a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review and consults for top-tier clients like Google, Microsoft and the World Bank.
But beyond these accolades, Dory has spent years helping high-achieving professionals rethink what it means to succeed and teaching them how to think long-term in a short-term world.
In this conversation, we explore what it means to slow down without losing momentum, to enjoy success without guilt and to redefine progress on your own terms.
I know you're going to love this episode.
Let's jump in. you're known for all of the incredible professional accolades that you have.
But I think a lot of people would be surprised to know your affinity for music.
So can you tell us about that?
I think it's just such a unique thing about you.
Yeah, thank you, Kwame.
Well, I think you know, like most of us, I started out writing extremely angsty songs on the guitar when I was a teenager.
And I set that aside for a while.
But about 10 years ago or nine years ago I got it in my head really quite suddenly that I wanted to learn how to write musical theater.
I had gone to a show and it just really hit me.
And I woke up the next morning.
I'm like, I need to learn how to do this.
And I had not done musical theater as the teenager or anything like that.
Grew up in a very small town.
We didn't even have a theater program because my school was so small.
So it wasn't something that I had really been exposed to very much.
So I had to start from scratch.
I really had no idea whatsoever how to do it.
But you can learn a lot in nine years.
And I think for me, that's the big lesson.
They say that we always overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a year.
That is exponentially more true of 10 years.
So I have gone from really not knowing anything to actually you know being, i would say, fair fairly good you know, but you know better, better than most amateurs anyway at writing musical theater and uh so, where i was just sharing one of my shows, just had a reading in malmo, sweden.
Uh, earlier this year a second show had a, a festival presentation in waco, texas.
And uh, my third show uh, just about two weeks ago, had a one night showcase at a club called 54 Below, a sort of famous club in New York City with a couple of Tony-nominated actors.
So, you know, we're making progress.
We're not at Broadway yet, but... but making progress.
This is incredible.
So let's do, let me have a brief aside for the audience, the listeners.
So whenever you're talking to somebody who's super high level and they say they are quote fairly good at something, just know that they're exceptional.
Because Dory, that track record of success with this doesn't seem to be something that indicates just fairly good.
This is significant.
And I'd be interested to know just internally, that internal conversation you had with yourself.
Because I feel like a lot of times, as professionals, as we get older, we have this voice in our head that says now it's time to be an adult.
And adult, we do boring things.
Doing something that's fun.
I have a philosophy that I try to both espouse and hew to for myself, which I talked about in my most recent book, The Long Game, which I call Optimize for Interesting.
And I really believe that an important thing that we need to do is to make life choices based on what's interesting.
Because, you know, I mean, YOLO.
What else are we going to do?
I've got to keep myself entertained.
And so I think that that is a virtue that both is entertaining for me, but also honestly, for other people.
It helps you connect with other people, because when you're doing things that are cool, that are different, that light you up, I think it draws in other people.
It makes you an object of interest so that they want to connect with you.
So that's the first part.
The second part is that I do think of it as being a... a reward in some ways.
I mean, I think that certainly it is true that at certain points in our life you have to go hard on building your business and creating economic security.
But it's also true that at a certain point you can begin, if you're doing things right, to cash in some of those chips and to take back some of the time and say OK, you know I've, I've made some good moves in the past, I'm invested in the past and so therefore I now have the freedom and the flexibility to spend a portion of my time doing non-income generating activities, so that you know, I mean maybe one day musical theater will make me some money.
I mean it's me.
It's made me a few thousand bucks, so I mean that's great over nine years.
But so it's not zero.
Kwame, don't think that.
But but overall it has.
It is certainly not been as lucrative as my other professional activities.
But I feel like I've I've earned the right to do that.
I think we all earn the right to do that, as we get more successful, that a greater and greater percentage of our time can be spent on doing doing things that we enjoy.
This is so smart.
And I like the framing too of earning the right to do this, because I realize sometimes in my mind I have this little fun police in my mind where it's, you know, well-meaning parents say hey, do your work and then you can have fun.
But now I'm realizing there are many more opportunities to inject some fun and interest into the work that we're doing.
And then it's like we are here.
One of the reasons why we're here, I feel like, is our purpose is just to enjoy life.
And it's odd that we feel like we have to kind of earn it or we don't deserve it.
I think it's really important to hear this message coming from you as well.
So can we talk more about fun and interest and what sparked you to make this part of your methodology?
Yeah, certainly.
And I'm curious.
I mean, of course, I'm happy to answer it.
But what does fun look like for you?
What are the fun things in your life?
Ooh.
Great question.
Okay, so for me, what I've realized is that my fun has had to shift.
So I'm married with two kids young kids and because of that a lot of my evening time is dedicated to family time.
So I'm trying to have as much fun with the boys as possible.
Um and just, we have the the hide and seek tickle game where they'll hide in incredibly obvious places and then i have to have to chase them and tickle them and it gets pretty intense story.
So that that's one element of fun.
Still a Going on dates with Whitney.
I think that's so important.
It's easy to lose that spark.
So scheduling those dates, and then we just have our nightly dates on the couch watching nonsense on TV, which is great.
But then also for me, physical activity is really important.
So I've started lifting.
So I wasn't really big into lifting before, but I would get in shape by just playing basketball with my friends, or I was –.
People often don't know this, but I was president of the club team at Ohio State.
So we went to nationals, took the team to nationals.
Billie Jean King watched us play.
It was great.
It was so cool.
But I don't get to play as much because that's an evening activity.
So I lift in the morning and have a really great community of friends at the gym.
So it's probably about 30% lifting and 70% talking at this point.
But those are the things that I do for fun nowadays.
I love it.
I think that's great.
And I want to just yes and you a little bit Kwame, because time with family is great.
You know time, time with you know I mean the weightlifting is like health plus time with your buddies.
So those are those are things that are great.
But those are also kind of foundational elements of like a well balanced life is like yes, you know, we should be spending time with our family, we should be paying attention to our health.
And so And while I would say that is necessary, I'm not sure it's sufficient.
And so if we're really thinking like fun, I think fun should actually be truly discretionary.
So I just want to plant the seed.
Like, what does that look like?
Oh, I felt all uncomfortable there.
I was like, oh, my gosh, that sounds fun.
Am I allowed to have fun now?
Now we're like unpacking the trauma of high achievement, right?
What is this?
And you're it's so funny that you say this, but.
I was having a call with one of my friends, Jess Ekstrom.
She's another keynote speaker, author, incredible.
And we talk business, we talk family and stuff.
And I said, do you ever struggle with feelings of being enough?
Not in the like, am I good enough?
But have I achieved enough to kind of relax a little bit?
Because I recognize that there's a little bit of scarcity inside of me from the early days of entrepreneurship where it's like hey, if you don't do these things, you're dead.
It's just over.
And now I'm at a point where I'm established but I still feel that scarcity where, if I'm doing something non-work related, I feel as if something's about to fall apart.
And so, to that point, a lot of that discretionary fun.
I recognize that now I'm at a point where I am more able than ever to to do this.
And it's from a safer perspective.
But it's still.
There's still something inside of me that holds me back from being as kind of go with the flowy, with with the fun that I used to have in the past.
Yeah, it's so it's so interesting.
And I mean, of course, what you're alluding to.
I mean, part of it is sort of our, you know our modern culture of achievement.
But also, I mean, where does that come from?
We're, you know, we're now going back, like, you know, 300 plus years to the Puritans.
And one of the you know sort of side things that I've done in my life is I went to Harvard Divinity School.
And one of my favorite classes actually was about early American religious history because you know, it was super interesting.
There was a professor named David Hall that I studied with and he was an expert in the Puritans And everybody thinks that the Puritans were just these like really super intense, like hard ass people, like just like work work work, work.
And, you know, we talk about the Puritan work ethic and everything.
And it is true that in some ways you know that culture has sort of seeped down into the cultural fabric of America and the achievement culture.
But it's also true.
I mean, I think this is just really funny, but it makes sense.
Right.
I mean, in any given culture, right. the majority of people are not that hardcore.
And so he did research into the lived experiences of most Puritans.
And I mean they were just like totally regular people who kind of mostly didn't like to go to church.
Like they were.
You know they were talking about how, in Puritan culture, it was mostly the women that dragged the men to church.
And the only reason they did it is because there was this belief that if you didn't get your baby baptized and your baby died which was honestly a lot of babies back then your baby would go to hell.
And so the women were like, we better go to church.
This is really important.
But aside from that, it was just like they were so slack because they were just regular people doing their thing.
And we have this image of like, go, go, go.
But.
I think in some ways, to me, that's just emblematic of like, wow, these things that become foundational and shape all of our psyches three centuries later are actually essentially a game of telephone through the generations anyway.
You're so right.
And this is, oh, now this is getting really interesting because you're 100% right.
And the game of telephone is legitimate.
And I'm wondering how much of this is just benign telephone nature, like the telephone nature of, like the passage of history, but how much of it is contrived where we're saying okay well, if we can get everybody to believe that hard work is the key to validation in this capitalist Western society, then we can extract more value from people as they build up our company.
I mean, it's certainly true.
It's interesting to think about all of those levers.
And I mean, the truth is, up to a point, it's very adaptive.
I did a TEDx talk a few years ago, and it became popular.
It got up on the TED website and everything.
It was called The Real Reason Why You Feel So Busy and What to Do About It.
And I was sort of trying to unpack this question of busyness and achievement and the constant need for it.
And honestly, one of the things that's kind of interesting is I came across some research by a woman named Sylvia Baletza at Columbia University and her colleagues.
And what they discovered is that essentially being busy, and especially saying you're busy like you know, how are you, Dory?
Oh, my God, I'm so busy.
Right.
People say that all the time.
This is the last word, culturally sanctioned way of basically saying you know what, kwame?
I'm so important, people need me, and it's just like this, this desperate cry for meaning and significance wow, you're so right.
You're so right because it's it's almost like um, a humble brag right, it's like oh, you know, i don't want to just tell you about my accolades, but just know There's a lot going on.
And yes, I'm suffering.
But, you know, it's for the best.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Poor me.
I'll manage.
That's so funny.
I remember this in law school very vividly.
It was it was a kind of like a toxic pain off between the students.
Oh, how are things going?
Oh, things are so hard.
I studied so hard.
It's like, really?
How many hours?
Six.
I wish it was just six for me.
And now it just gets really weird.
Really weird.
Totally.
How have you started to intentionally break free from that?
Well, I think there's a couple of lines on it.
I mean the first one, at a basic level, and I realize this is sort of easier said than done is achieving a certain level of financial security right?
I mean, let's be clear, if we're thinking about like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you do need to be in a certain place before you can kind of relax.
And I spent a long time, like a lot of my 20s, for instance.
You know, there's a saying, which in my case certainly was true, where it's like you learn in your 20s and you earn in your 30s.
And in my 20s I had jobs.
Like you know, for a couple of years I was a nonprofit executive director.
I was a journalist.
I worked on political campaigns.
And when you have a job like that, like you're getting great experience, you're meeting people, but you're certainly not making a lot of money.
I was, you know, making three grand a month, you know, I may work my way up to four grand a month.
And I was feeling very good about that.
But it was not the kind of thing to give you a huge amount of economic security.
So for, you know, for a while, you just you do have to really focus on that and hustle.
But the problem for a lot of, you know, middle or upper middle class professionals is is that you do get to a certain point where objectively, like if you're really looking at it, you're in a pretty good place.
And even then you can't take your foot off the accelerator because you're just like, but no.
I mean, there's been all of these studies where they continually ask people so how much would you need to really feel good?
Like how much would you need to really feel set?
And we keep getting the same response from all these things.
And the response, of course, as you can imagine, right?
It's not a number, right?
The response is twice as much as I have now, almost universally.
You have 10 million, you need 20.
You have 20, you need 40.
And then you'll feel really good.
So you've got this just like receding target.
So I tried to, you know, pull myself back from that and just realize like okay, you know, that's a game you're really never going to win, in a literal sense.
And so when I had made enough that I felt like, okay, I'm okay.
I'm not going to be homeless.
You know, if there's a dry season, which inevitably there will be, you know I'm not going to be living under a bridge.
It's all right.
I've got at least those bases covered.
Then you can begin to step back and psychologically separate yourself from the ego part of it.
Brilliant.
So it's almost like a truly logic-based emotional negotiation, right?
Where you're kind of trying to be as substantive as possible.
I think that's right.
And, you know, I mean, I think...
There's some other things where maybe just in terms of personality, I'm a little lucky.
One is that I'm I'm surprisingly not competitive.
People, people sometimes assume if you're a reasonably successful person, they're like oh, you must be so competitive.
You know, and I'm really not like you know.
I mean, I know that there's plenty of people who like whatever the thing is like who can eat more hot dogs, who can make more you know jump shots, you know who can, who can write more articles for this show publication or what, and like any metric they're competing on and for.
For me, i just i really feel at peace, like i have a feeling that you know you.
You played on the ohio state club basketball.
I have a feeling you're safely better at basketball than me.
I don't I don't really need to contest that in any way.
It does not, it does not hurt my ego.
You can have that.
And so I feel I feel good in a lot of ways.
Just, you know, as they say, really competing with myself like I don't, I don't need to win everything.
And I understand there are some people that do, but I think for most of us, you know, if we, if we just really get clear on the parameters, it's okay not to win everything.
This is great.
And I think a little bit of um there's.
There's some, uh some good work that's going on right here.
That is lying beneath the surface.
Because, even though you're not competing with people I know for sure because you know our industry people are competing with you.
We should just take this clip and send it to them.
Just be like, everybody, chill.
You're okay.
Let's talk about your book.
The, the, the most recent one, the long game, but that's the most recent one, right?
It is.
Yes.
So when you wrote that book, What do you think?
How would you describe the problem you were trying to solve?
So I can even give you a kind of moment, right?
I will paint the moment for you of the problem that I was trying to solve.
So I started thinking about this book just prior to the pandemic.
And I feel like in 2019 the universe had kind of reached peak economic frenzy, peak stress.
Before 2019, you know, the pandemic shut everything down and had us recalibrate.
And during that time, I kept to the point about busyness.
You know where the where the TEDx talk came from.
I kept hearing from people, even people who worked for themselves and, in theory, controlled their own schedule.
I would talk to them and say, like, how, you know, how are you doing?
What's what's going on?
And they'd be like, Oh, my God, I'm so busy.
I just wish I had a moment to think.
I just wish I had a moment to breathe.
And so many of them sounded miserable.
And it seemed very clear to me as an outsider that they were creating these conditions.
They had somehow trapped themselves in these conditions.
And I kept thinking, well, what's going wrong here?
Why is this happening?
Because clearly this is not an outcome that they want, but somehow they feel powerless to change it.
And of course, I saw glimmers of that in myself.
And so I began really trying to unpack that.
What is it that gets in the way of us achieving the life that we claim to want?
And that was when I began to really focus on this long-term thinking question.
And how can we be more successful at doing that and fighting off the seeming imperatives of the short term?
I want to zoom in on one word, claim to want.
That was very intentional.
Let's dig into that.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I think that, you know, we're sort of used to this as humans, right?
That we say plenty of things.
And there are things that are socially appropriate to say.
And there are things that we might even genuinely believe.
But ultimately, we vote with our feet.
That's, if I have to like sum up my life philosophy in like one phrase.
I feel like the one truth that I can cling to is we vote with our feet.
We judge us by the actions, not by the words.
And so you know, if people say, like you know oh, I just want to spend more time with my family, you know as people do, because that sounds really nice.
And then they consistently keep making choices to get away from that.
It's, you know, there's something going on.
Like, It may not be that they're lying about it consciously.
Maybe they do want to spend time with their family.
But it could be, for instance, as we were talking about earlier, that there is an even greater need for them than spending time with their family, which might be the need to assuage their ego that they are important and necessary.
And then they can find a backfill justification about well, the reason I'm working so hard is my family.
You know, this sounds like the great philosopher Walter White. from breaking bad do you remember because he kept on saying i'm doing this for my family but then at the end in the final episode he's like no i did it for me it's like oh i mean duh we saw it we saw this and it's it's so interesting because it almost it can we can have some deep philosophical questions what is a person really are they more what they do um or what they say they want to be And at some point, you kind of have to believe, like you said, they vote with their feet, even though there might be a part of them that aspires to be something different.
We have to recognize that humans really fundamentally, we are what we do with consistency.
And that can be a kind of scary reality to be confronted with about yourself, too.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, these are not easy choices, obviously.
I mean, if they were, we would all with flying colors.
And, to be clear, there are certainly some circumstances where we legitimately have to make choices that you know, that speak to a lower part of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs before we can get into self-actualization.
And, you know, all that's fine.
But I'm specifically talking about people who are successful enough professionals that they have some discretion.
Yeah. in their lives, in their income, in their time.
And yet they feel like they're not ending up in the place that they're intending to end up.
And so what is going on there?
That's the problem I wanted to solve.
Absolutely.
And let's talk about emotions too, because when it comes to decision-making, that's largely emotional.
When you think about the challenges that the folks who are the target reader for the book are experiencing.
What emotions are they experiencing?
But also what can they do to start to overcome them?
Yeah.
So at its heart you know the subtitle of the book The Long Game is how to be a long term thinker in a short term world.
And I was choosing that frame because for me that was the thing in conversations with professionals in this orbit.
That's what kept coming up. is there was an aspiration or a desire to be a long-term thinker.
I mean, everybody wants to be strategic.
They don't want to waste their time.
They want to make the right moves.
But there are so many pressures from so many sides about well yeah yeah yeah, all that's great, but I need this now.
You need to do that now.
And it could be anything from you know the sort of classic quarterly earnings at corporations that are required.
So you have to do the thing now, because Wall Street is breathing down your neck to.
You know a boss that is demanding that you respond to their emails within 35 seconds, which means you keep getting interrupted from the equally important long-term project that he says he wants from you, but you just never are given the bandwidth to be able to do it.
So I think that the emotion, they're probably the most helpful frame.
There's a book I read a few years ago called Scarcity, and it was a sociology book, essentially.
It was by an author whose name I hope I'm pronouncing right, which is Sundil Mulanathan.
And it was basically about the experience of being poor, in many different ways, right?
You can say poor in money, but also poor in time, you know, whatever, poor in opportunity.
And what that does to your brain, and it turns out that very similar things happen.
You know, when you are poor in money and you're like starving well, that's when you would do a thing like okay well, you know, I'm really hungry, so I'm going to shoplift this food which, of course, leads to like jail and like catastrophic consequences that a rational person would never do.
But in the moment, it's like, well, I've got to eat.
And so, similarly you know, in perhaps less perilous terms a very similar thing happens to us when we are short on time and our brains get into a scarcity mentality where it's like well, I've got to get this thing done.
And so it feels so big and so important, even if it's actually not.
That you get it done, but you're willing to get it done at the expense of something that might be really important in the long term or might kind of screw up your long term plans.
And so understanding what happens to your brain and how it constricts your decision making is really interesting to be aware of.
Yes, this is fascinating.
Fascinating.
So I'm a psychology nerd at heart.
That was my undergrad.
I love this.
And I'm wondering when you consider blend that psychology with the neuroscience behind neuroplasticity, where we're saying okay, the brain has been shaped through this experience.
You might have graduated or personally evolved beyond that scarcity in that moment, but your brain still is shaped by that scarcity.
So you're still feeling it, even though it might not be there.
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We can certainly create patterns of behavior or, you know, patterns of neurons for ourselves.
Yeah.
That's fascinating.
Fascinating.
And it's so funny how much of this we think about intangible terms like substantive terms, scarcity.
We can say what is there versus what isn't there, what we do need versus what we don't have.
But also too, it's like how our brains can change the perception based on our experience, and our emotions too.
That's a big, totally.
I I'd like to pivot though, uh for a bit, because you are not just a leadership expert, but also a communications expert too.
And over time um, things have shifted when it comes to how society has interacted with each other, especially when you think about the.
What has happened since COVID?
What's happening with misinformation, with AI evolution, um.
What are your thoughts or feelings as it relates to the state of communication today versus maybe, at the beginning of your career?
You know, I used to do a lot of work in politics.
I was a spokesperson on a presidential campaign in the 2004 cycle.
And I was a spokesperson on a governor's race in the 2002 cycle.
And then you know for a few years after that.
Probably you know Up until 2010.
Maybe I would consult on different races doing press and communication strategy.
So I had my hand in it for nearly a decade.
And nowadays, whenever my background in politics comes up, I just always hasten to say you know, not lately.
You know, thank God.
I don't want people to be, you know, confused about any of that.
I think that...
You know, like like a lot of things there.
There was a period, I mean many of your listeners probably were not around or paying attention or what have you.
But I, you know, certainly it was impactful for me because I was very, very into politics from a young age.
In 1994, Newt Gingrich came to power with his contract with America.
And that was, I mean, Newt Gingrich was a very smart and organized guy.
And so there's much to admire in terms of his strategy around doing it.
There is little to admire in terms of how he coarsened and reshaped the dialogue and turned what had been a reasonably workable and collegial dialogue balance of the ecosystem in Washington into something that was so aggressive and fraught and partisan that it sort of began the slide into acrimony that we are seeing today.
And you know, even then, you know the country could still come together around certain things.
You know post 9-11 and what have you?
But it's been very difficult because now we have normalized a situation of things that that never should be normalized in terms of ad hominem attacks, in terms of um, people you know in the highest levels is saying things that that aren't true, that are exaggerations, and then and then just shrugging it off.
So i i find it uh, a deep embarrassment and uh and a a pretty grave problem actually, because politics uh used to be much like journalism, used to be a thing that, even when people who are outsiders criticized it or got mad about it, I mean, nobody likes it when you say a bad thing about them.
They'll always be like, oh, it's so biased.
It's so terrible.
But there was a sense among people working in politics and among people working in journalism, both of which I did that Really you were, you were serving a higher good.
You know I mean not like God, but you know you were.
You were really trying to do something positive for society.
And I think that just a descent into into bald partisan is partisanship is is troubling for sure.
I agree.
And what I think what's even more troubling is that we see there's a lot of a bit of mimetic desire, but I think it's just like the ability to recognize what works and then mimic that too.
You know where there's the reality, that we see what works in politics and what we see at the highest level.
And then people say, well, if it works on that level, I think it could work here.
I could just ramp up the level of aggression and it works.
And the thing that's really tough is that, for the people who can do it really well, It does work in terms of getting the outcomes that they personally want.
The challenge is that it leads to the degradation of society as a whole.
And then, when you think about just the power of communication as a tool, let's think about this as like an invention, like fire, like fire's pivotal right.
What are humans without communication?
And this is one of the things that I'm recognizing is that I feel as though we are at a point where, potentially for the first time, our ability to communicate is actually getting worse.
It's degrading at a time where the stakes have never been higher.
When we think about the things that are at issue,
And it becomes incredibly challenging to solve a problem in a meaningful way if we don't have a foundation of communication.
And I think even something that we took for granted when it comes to communication in the past was just operating from a shared reality.
We might disagree on what the facts mean, but we could at least say hey, I saw a picture, I saw a video, I saw an article.
This is reality.
We can have a debate now about what this means or what we should do.
But now we're having a much deeper debate on what is real.
And so this is a question I've been getting a lot on stage.
How do we negotiate reality?
So for you, when you think about truth reality, misinformation and everything on top of partisanship, how do we evolve in terms of our ability to communicate, just as a species?
Yeah.
And you're putting your finger Kwame, on a really important point, which is that it's interesting because you know you're saying this is the first time that our communication skills might be going backwards.
And the irony is that all of a sudden, the tools of communication have never been better.
I mean, like chat GPT, I put in a thing.
I'm like I want to send an angry complaint letter to blah blah blah, but I don't want it to be too angry.
I want it to be just the right amount of angry.
And it'll write this thing, and it is absolutely perfect.
It's so good.
It's like, oh, my gosh.
You know, I could send this, and it would be amazing.
And so the fine tuning that it could do to, to help all of us achieve exactly the right amount of nuance in terms of pushing back, in terms of making our arguments.
It's unbelievable.
I think that what has faltered is the will, because it's it's.
It's sort of like okay well, just upstream, like well, you know, I don't, I don't actually care what they think.
So I'm just going to steamroll them or I'm just going to call them an idiot or, or whatever it is.
And so we don't, we don't even bother to try to pretend for the nuance to.
I think that for me, the big lesson up here and you know I always talk about this with you know I run this mastermind where I do, you know, coaching and stuff as part of it for folks who are professional service providers and they're looking to grow their platforms and things like that.
So we'll often talk about things like you know, whether it's like writing articles or their offerings or things like that.
And a piece of advice that I often share with them is that we need to go higher upstream in terms of their communications.
Because, whether it's like a sales page that they're doing or an article they're writing, they'll often start it well, here's how to do X.
And I'll often stop and say okay, That's great.
That's really useful.
Very few people understand that they even need to do X right now.
So we need to jump in higher and say, well, why do you need to do X?
Why is that the thing that is going to be useful for solving the problem?
Once you ground them in that, then they will be bought into the second part about here's how to do it.
But you can't.
You want to meet people exactly where they are in the conversation and not make presumptions.
So I think a thing that we probably all have to do in our communication now is to start a little further upstream, to sort of establish like OK, you see this right.
This is a problem, right?
You can see the consequence of this, right?
OK, so let's now let's talk about where we go with this.
Brilliant.
It's so important because as you become more knowledgeable in your field you'll be you gain an expertise.
Then it becomes a little bit more difficult for you to understand what it feels like to not have that expertise, which makes it much harder for you to communicate with someone who doesn't have it, because you're going to start off at a different spot and assume that they're following along.
And a lot of times people want to save face.
They have the ego and they don't feel like being vulnerable.
So, hey, do you understand this?
Absolutely.
I do.
Right.
Because they don't want to let you know that they don't know what, what you're talking about.
Step one wise.
So I think this is great advice reminding people, especially if they have deep expertise, to just question themselves and say hey, are you starting off at step one?
Because you might be at step three or four.
And this is actually a great use case for AI.
I know I've used it.
I was working with a client that's a law firm and they were having trouble with what we call the TikTokification of communication, where they're trying to persuade juries and they're saying they are not understanding or are arguments.
So one of the things was talking about how they could use AI as a communication partner to make it a lot simpler and start off at a place where they could actually understand.
So yeah, you're right.
The tools are there for the amplification of communication, but it's our willingness to utilize them effectively.
That's often what's missing.
Yeah, absolutely.
Because otherwise, if you start too far downstream, it's really easy for people to draw, especially in a in a polarized environment.
It should just draw completely the wrong conclusions.
You know, I mean you know, I think about.
You know during during, all the.
You know the crazy sort of societal blow up a few, a few years ago during the pandemic, and you know all the talk about like defund, the police.
Well, okay.
So, so people who were upset about crime, they hear defund the police.
And what they think is you don't care about crime.
You just want to defund the police because you don't give a shit about crime.
And i mean, of course, if you think the person doesn't care about crime, you're gonna think they are a moron.
Why would you talk to that person?
And meanwhile it's like okay well, i think they're making a different argument, but we need to, like really start up here to explain that no actually, no one likes crime, crime is not a good thing.
And let's, let's look to the future Doreen, let's see what the future looks like.
You have a crystal ball here and you can tell us what you see.
So, when you think about the future of communication and leadership over the next few years, what do you think would be the biggest challenges that people are going to face?
Oh, my goodness.
I think that everyone clearly is is, you know, thinking all the time, is obsessed about AI and where is AI going and what is?
What does that look like?
And I think that when we think about, you know, the future of communication in general, right there's, there's high level kind of you know national policy, or you know maybe CEOs, leading organizations, things like that.
And then there's communication for, for the rest of us.
There's communication for, for people in general.
And I mean, I'm, I think at the national highest levels, it's going to be complicated times.
But if we're thinking local, it's actually revolutionary.
I mean, there is technology now which it's so beta.
I literally can't even figure out how to use it, even though I know it's on my phone.
But Like, I cannot wait.
I mean, this is this is happening on our phone.
It's clearly imperfect.
And one day I'll figure out how to use it.
But there's the thing, right, where it's real time translation from Spanish and French and German.
I mean, you know, whatever.
Give it another year.
They'll have 200 languages.
But what I mean?
I'm just, you know, praising the heavens right now because I, I'm one of those like really, really pathetic Americans that, despite how much french i have had in my life, i like i can't even tell you how many years i've studied french and i really can only order breakfast and that's it and it's.
It's just a humiliation to me.
It's an enduring humiliation, and now it's like i i will be relieved of this because i can, i can speak french and understand french really well, instantly.
I mean, this is not a future thing, this is like a probably within six months thing.
So that's amazing.
I think about the fact that, for people who are, they speak maybe good enough English or insert the language, but not great, like they're not a native or something.
And the fact that ChatGPT and its friends can polish it so that they can send email and communications and have it be completely seamless um, that you know there's, there's the potential for, for all of those types of things that, even for people who are native speakers um, but i mean, you know, this is helpful for all of us, but certainly for people maybe who are neurodivergent or they have uh, some challenges with, like you know, getting getting the emotional match, you know totally in line um, that that it can help attune in that way.
It's absolutely unbelievable.
So i think we're on the precipice of really great things, at least at the individual level.
I don't know what's your read, man.
Yeah, i think i, i'm with you.
I think it's going to be complicated, messy and challenging on the like the the, the top leaders, like politics, those type of things, because they're going to have to wrestle with so much.
There's more partisanship every year.
And then also we have to wrestle with what is real and how do we, or do we at all, have introduced some meaningful regulation to protect people from being tricked?
How do we handle that?
I think that's going to be tough.
I think, interestingly enough, there's going to be a bit more of a shift and a migration to focusing on the local level.
So, like our neighbors, our friends, our family, and focusing on how we can really connect with people on a deeper level.
Because, like you said, we can now have real-time translation so we could actually meaningfully communicate, converse with people who are different, that we wouldn't have been able to communicate with in previous times.
So I think what's going to be interesting is that there's going to be such a lack of clarity when it comes to communication on the macro level that I think it'll start to create more craving for community and communication on the micro level.
And hopefully we can see people coming back and connecting in person, because that's going to be the type of connection with that we can actually trust.
Absolutely.
I mean I continually try to remind myself of positive developments because it's so easy to just get swallowed up with the negativity and sort of the uncertainty about the future which you know, I mean it's possible civilizational collapse is around the corner.
There's a non-zero chance.
But, you know, what can I do about it?
I can't do anything about it.
But also, it is amazing if, you know, because we take it for granted, right?
Like I remember and i mean i'm sure you do too like when i was in college, i spent a summer in norway and i stayed in the dorms at the university of oslo and there was one pay phone at the end of the the hallway.
We didn't have phones in our rooms.
There was no cell phones, they like.
I mean I guess they had been invented, but like a person didn't have them.
And so I would, I would queue up to like call my parents or my girlfriend, you know, like once a week, and I had a phone card and I would, you know, dial in with a with a 27 numbers, and you know, and then I would, I would do that.
And I mean, my, I mean, my parents were furious.
Honestly, I spent like $400 a month, like on phone calls.
Like it was, I mean, I wasn't even being crazy.
It was like, you know, an hour or two or whatever.
And it was hundreds of dollars.
It's like, no wonder people weren't talking to each other.
It was so onerous.
And then, oh my God, the big innovation after 9 p.m.
Kwame, it was free.
You could wait till 901.
It was free.
And like now, okay, it's a flat rate.
It's whatever, 70 bucks a month.
And you can call anyone, anywhere.
You do whatever you want.
And it's just.
The sea change in 20 25 years is astonishing in terms of our ability to communicate around the world.
So, I mean, there are some things that I feel like are unfettered goods.
I agree.
I agree.
And I think it's so important to make sure we focus on that, because the – having nice messages about the future, it doesn't really return on the algorithm.
It has to be scary.
Fear keeps us locked in.
So I think this is a very important message.
So, when you think about the message that you want to leave people with, and with all of the thought leadership that you've developed over time, if there was one thing you wanted to leave the listeners with, whether it's leadership life, whatever it happens to be, what do you think would be the one message you want to send to the listeners?
Oh, my goodness.
I would say we've been talking a lot about these questions of long-term thinking, of communicating in a volatile political environment.
We've been talking about optimizing for interesting.
And so what I would say is that one of the things that I discovered in the course of researching the question of how to successfully be a long-term thinker in a short-term world is is that the underappreciated element in all of it is courage.
Because it is so easy to get cowed in the moment into doing the short-term thing, because you're afraid of the consequences, because it's easier to go with the flow, it's easier to do the things everybody else is doing.
And the problem about things with a long-term payoff is is that it can sometimes take a really, really long time for that payoff to come.
And during the period that you are waiting for the crops to grow, you look like an idiot with just a bunch of sand.
You know.
Like, okay, sure, it's going to come.
Good luck with that.
It's just a lot easier always to be the skeptic and to...
And to want the thing now, because the thing now is obvious and anyone can see it, whereas it's a select few that can, that are patient enough to wait to see the future.
And so I think we have to understand that you have to you have to be a courageous person.
You have to cultivate the virtue of courage to be able to be a long term thinker.
Oh, brilliant.
This is great.
So listeners, if you want to connect with Dory, learn from her, we've got several multiple books.
And how many LinkedIn learning courses do?
I've done 25 LinkedIn learning courses.
Unbelievable.
That is so cool.
Well, Dory, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you for coming on the show.
And what is the best way for folks to connect and work with you?
Thank you so much, Kwame.
Yeah, if folks want to see all the things, I'm at doryclark.com.
If they'd like to get a free long game strategic thinking self-assessment to help guide you through becoming a more strategic thinker.
You can get that for free at doryclarkcom.
Slash the long game.
Amazing.
Dory, thank you so much.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you, Kwame.
So good to talk with you.
