Todd, I would love to just learn, based on your story, when it was maybe that you saw this notion of candor being something that is not only important, but it was going to become your life’s work?
There’s when I realized it become my life’s work, but the roots of it started earlier. I think I want to explain that because I think my story, I think a lot of people have the same story. So As a kid, my father, who’s actually, sadly, very ill right now, so I’m thinking a lot about him, he always told me to be honest. Not that he could always follow. Of that principle, but he definitely drilled it into me at an early age. Then I remember this going to my grandparents’ wedding anniversary, 35th wedding anniversary. We had this great party, and we come back to the house, and my grandmother asks me, Well, how did you like the party? I hear my dad’s voice in my head be honest, and I said, I didn’t like it. She says, Why not? I said, Well, because you kept calling grandpa an idiot all night, and I don’t think you love him. I’m seven years old. My grandma is totally cool with it. She’s like, Oh, my mom’s not cool with it. She pulls me to the side of the room and she says, You can’t talk to your grandma that way.
But dad always told me to be honest. She’s like, not that honest. Then just from that point on, and I’m writing the book on this now, so I’m remembering all these stories, I always felt in a horrible dilemma. If I didn’t say what I thought, I would just feel horrible. But then when I did, things went horribly, and I had no way to resolve it. If I didn’t say what I thought, I would just feel like a coward and like a sellout and all of these things. But then when I did, sometimes people will get pissed off at me. Then I ended up really not realizing this is what I was doing, but studied a lot of things around communication and negotiation and influence and public speaking and all these things and listening. I mean, I could teach you the greatest course on listening ever, but my ability to follow all these things that I was teaching was really limited. I was more interested in what I had to say than what anybody else had to say, for example. And so I went to… I did my master’s, my first master’s at Columbia University, and they had some consultants come in and run a mini workshop with us.
And I fancied myself as a good communicator. After I went through this exercise, I realized I had a lot of problems with the way I communicated and the way I interacted with people, and that I started realizing the source of a lot of my frustrations around the conversations not going as I hoped they would go were my fault. There were things that I didn’t realize that I was doing and not doing, which were me from getting better results. Then it was like a conversion experience for me. Then I went on this crusade of, Okay, I’m going to help other people. I’m going to try to solve the problem that I’m suffering for because I think other people are suffering from it as well. That was a little over 30 years ago now. Then since then, I’ve dedicated my life to helping people have much better conversations with each other about anything that matters.
