Robyn: Nine out of 10 conversations miss the mark, meaning that the intent doesn't equal the impact. Instead of getting frustrated or defensive when things don't land like we expected them to, we can take it as a cue: Okay, I need to slow down. I need to get curious. Double-click here. What am I missing? Where's the gap? Where did this go wrong?
Anne: Hi, everybody. It is Anne Duffy, and welcome to the Just DeW It podcast. I am here today with, I would say, a new, fast, good friend of mine. I've heard so much great information about her as she led through the dental communities throughout her career. Let me tell you a little bit about her before we get started.
Anne: Robyn Ramirez is a coach, speaker, and expert in leadership, communication, and mental fitness. She helps dental entrepreneurs build thriving practices and empowers individuals to strengthen communication, resilience, and emotional mastery. Blending positive intelligence and conversational intelligence, she drives lasting transformation in business and life.
An adventurer at heart, she's training for her second 500-mile Camino walk and loves bringing people together over great food, meaningful conversations, and shared experiences. Please help me welcome Robyn Ramirez. Hello, Robyn.
Robyn: Hello. Thank you, Anne.
Anne: Oh my God, I love the end of it because I love great food, meaningful conversations, and shared experiences. I think we could be fast friends if you lived down the street from me, right?
Robyn: I think so.
Anne: I just love it. I love knowing you. And the Camino walk, oh my gosh. Is it life-changing, and what did you think about it?
Robyn: It was absolutely life-changing, more so than I thought. I actually went into it thinking it would be more about the physicality of it, which I love, and the nature and all of that. But it was as much emotional as it was spiritual, as it was physical. It was all the things. It was great.
Anne: All the things. That's on my bucket list, and you've given me some encouragement. I'm going to look into that. That's another one of those things. I don't think you can be too old to do the Camino walk, and you can take it at your own time, your own pace, and go as long as you want. But 500 miles.
Robyn: You just summed it up: your own time, your own pace. It's your Camino. It surprises a lot of people when they get there, I hear, or when I talk about it later, but I would say the majority of people on the Camino are over 65, because who has that kind of time? Retirees.
Anne: That's right. I think I'm going to put that on our list. I'm really excited to hear you talk about it, but I'm also so intrigued with conversational intelligence. How did you first come across that, and how has it changed the way you coach and lead?
Robyn: I was definitely on the search for something. I'm going to assume, like a lot of DeWs, I've always been sort of that natural leader, one of those people that other people just gravitate toward. Maybe it's because I'm not afraid to speak up, share my opinion, and boss people around a little bit.
Anne: Bossy. Your bossy little girl turns into a great natural leader. I think that's true.
Robyn: Exactly. At any rate, I just also seem to naturally land in leadership positions. I honestly felt pretty comfortable, and I fanned the flames of that. I love to take in anything I can, reading or listening or otherwise, about leadership, communication, and positivity. To me, all of those things go together and always have. I always likened myself to a pretty decent communicator.
Then I had four kids. Probably enough said right there. But to add to it, I also eventually started coaching. My first official coaching title was business development coach for dental offices, which unofficially means everything, right? Marketing, strategy, SOPs, P&Ls, scheduling, hiring, firing, everything.
As time went on, I was experiencing a couple things. First of all, it starts to feel like if everything's important, which it is, all of those things and all the rest of the things are important. But if you're trying to address everything at once, if everything's important, nothing's important, right? It's overwhelming. It's too much.
The other thing I was noticing is that almost without fail, as I was onboarding new clients and their teams, one of the first things they were asking for was help with communication. Better communication. Some communication. Any communication.
Anne: How do I get through to my team?
Robyn: Exactly. And the team: Why won't you just tell us what's going on? Can't we all just get along? It's always a two-way street.
Anne: Always a two-way street.
Robyn: Right. Always two-way. I was excited for that because I thought I was a pretty darn good communicator. I felt like I'd been successful with that in my own life, but it did not take me long to figure out that an effective conversation and coaching somebody how to have an effective conversation were two completely different animals, two different skill sets.
Meanwhile, back on the ranch, there were starting to be some really clear signs that maybe my own conversations weren't nearly as effective as I thought they were. So as they say, when the student is ready, the teacher appears.
Anne: The teacher appears.
Robyn: I was at a WBECS coaching summit, and I heard a quote, sort of a teaser for some upcoming speakers. It was for Judith Glaser, who's the founder of Conversational Intelligence. It totally resonated for me. It brought all of those things together. Of course, I went to her training, eventually took her course, and ultimately ended up getting certified. It was literally a life-changer for me. It was probably, I would say, one of the two major shifts that changed the way I lead, the way I coach, and really, honestly, the way I do everything: the way I friend, the way I wife, the way I parent. All the things.
Anne: Wait, was this a quote that just knocked you off your feet?
Robyn: It started with that quote.
Anne: Do you remember the quote?
Robyn: I remember the quote. I speak about it all the time.
Anne: I would love to hear the quote. Tell me more.
Robyn: It's, “To get to the next level of greatness depends on the quality of our culture.” She's talking about any culture, whether it's the culture of the country, the culture of our church, the culture of our family, the culture of our business, the office we work in, or the department we work in.
So, to get to the next level of greatness depends on the quality of the culture, which depends on the quality of the relationships, which depends on the quality of the conversations. Everything happens through conversation. That's the piece. Everything happens through conversation. My mind was around, “I've got all these things to coach,” but when I came back to it, all of those things are really your coaching conversations, your coaching communication.
It just cracked something open. The other thing is it really demonstrates why leadership isn't just about a title or a role, but that we're all leaders, whether we like it or not. For every single one of us, that leadership shows up in how we handle hard moments or conflicts, how we show up for others, and probably most especially the way that we communicate with ourselves in our own brain in that conversation.
At any rate, I started leading differently, most of all probably less from a place of trying to have all the answers and more from a place of curiosity, which is another great thing about CIQ. It really invites that humble leadership, and it helped me understand that being a good communicator wasn't all about clarity or persuasiveness. It certainly isn't about being articulate.
Anne: Yes.
Robyn: It was about being connected. When you start to view every conversation through that lens, as a reflection of your leadership, every conversation, then it changes how you coach, how you parent, how you partner, at least for me.
Anne: I love that because I always thought it was about, I'm thinking of my kids, and I have three kids. I'm like, “I'm telling you.” You always think, as a mom, if you had just said it a different way, they would've gotten it. There are so many things we go through like that. So many conversations, and I think a lot of it is we are two steps ahead of where we need to be in the conversation.
That quote is beautiful. I also love that you said everyone is a leader and everybody has the ability to transform their conversations into speaking like a leader. We're not all born leaders. Mostly, leaders are made.
Robyn: I kind of almost feel like they get realized and acknowledged. If people start to realize, “Wait, even if I don't think of myself as a leader, everybody's leading themselves.” If nothing else, you're leading yourself, and other people are following you whether you realize it or not. They're paying attention.
Anne: That's what's so good about the older we get. The sage leadership just naturally comes. We've had the experience. It's really nice to be able to validate that because I think everybody wants to lead themselves, the people in their little circle, a bigger circle, or whatever. I really believe that is true. It's nice to back that up with your science and your information.
There's something you used to believe about communication, and now that is completely changed for you over time. I am very curious about what that was.
Robyn: If I'm being completely honest, there are a lot of things. But what's beautiful is that at least part of this, in my mind, connects exactly with what you were saying around your kids. I just thought, “If I am a little more clear, if I slow down, if I say it louder.”
Anne: Oh, yeah.
Robyn: But really, the big one for me was my perspective around “common sense.” That was always a big key phrase at the house I grew up in: “Common sense dictates,” or, “Of course.” I used to think that what I believed was common sense, of course people would understand what I meant or just see what I saw. It felt obvious to me.
Anne: I used to say, “Who does that? I don't get it.”
Robyn: Right. Because common sense dictates.
Anne: It's not common.
Robyn: Exactly. My sister sent me a meme years ago, right around the time when I was being certified: “Common sense is so uncommon, it should be named a superpower,” or something like that.
Anne: I love that.
Robyn: At any rate, over time, and definitely through the lens of CIQ, conversational intelligence, I've definitely started to realize that assuming people think like me is one of the biggest blind spots in communication. CIQ talks about five major blind spots, and that's definitely one of them, because we all do it. We assume others see what we see, feel what we feel, and value what we value.
But obviously they don't. Everybody's coming from their own experience. What's interesting is that our brains are wired to fill in the blanks based on our own experiences, obviously not on the other person's experiences. So when we're being listened to or when we're trying to listen to somebody else, we're not just hearing their words; we're filtering it through all of our own personal history, memories, emotions, all of the things.
That's why one of the shifts for me has been listening not just to respond, but more so to make sure that I actually know what the other person means, not just what they said. It is a whole new way of doing that that I honestly just wasn't great at before, and I'm still learning.
A big epiphany is that the meaning doesn't live in the words of the speaker. We think that we say something to our kids, and there we go. They should get it. But really, it lives in the mind of the listener. Unless we slow down to check, to make sure that we have a shared understanding, then we can walk away from the exact same conversation with two completely different realities.
Realizing that being a good communicator isn't about making a great point, which is hard for me because I love to make a great point. It was about the connection. It's not about being right, again hard, because I love to be right.
Anne: Yep.
Robyn: But if you really want to know how to influence an outcome long term, more than just winning that immediate battle, winning the conversation or whatever, then you have to know that it's about being in sync. Then it just changes how you show up for a conversation and show up for your team, your partner, whoever.
Anne: This totally makes me think about giving them the grace to be heard and making sure they feel like they were heard. When I would be talking to some of my kids, I'd be interrupting them. I do that a lot. I give them words, and sometimes I think you just have to sit back.
Somebody said to me one time, “Act like you've got a blank tape in your head, and you're just taking it all in.” Sometimes when I'm in a conversation, I go back to that because it's the only way I can keep blips together and not comment, because I know what is common sense, and I know the better path. Yet people like to discover their own path, right? When they don't ask for your advice, it comes across as criticism.
I'm like, “Oh, well, that's interesting. No, you knew I was so critical.” Nobody ever asked me for my advice, so how do I get a chance to really impact my children, my adult kids? But they've done great. I have to say, they all turned out just fine.
But you look back on some of those things, and it might've been easier if I had taken your course on positive intelligence and conversational intelligence. I think we can all learn something about that, and we're never too old to start.
Robyn: Absolutely not. Even in an office example, I get this same thing but different all the time. Just like that meaning and having that blank tape, having that idea of, “Let me go into this with the idea of discovery versus already knowing the answer or thinking I know the answer or the right answer.”
I remember a very specific example of working with a team where the doctor just kept saying, “I want us to focus more on patient care.” Of course, everybody nods along. He's coming to me saying, “I've been trying to get this across.” As we dig more into it, he's getting more and more frustrated. “Why are people not making changes? What do I have to do around here?”
But really, when we got to dig more into it and finally had a sit-down team meeting, everybody thought that they were working on it. They just all had a very different idea of what patient care meant.
For the assistant, it meant being quicker. “Let's get them in on time and out on time,” because that was a big thing in their office. They weren't running wonderfully on time. In her mind, that would be taking great care of them: get them in, get them out, let's be quicker.
But to the front desk, it meant spending more time with each patient on the phone and taking great care, and having longer, better conversations. To the doctor, really what he meant, bottom line, was doing more comprehensive diagnosis.
Anne: Okay.
Robyn: So once we got to slow down and get everybody aligned, everything changed. Everybody saw everybody else's movie of the mind.
It's like with kids, right? “I need you to be more responsible.” Do they hear what I really mean? “I don't want to have to tell you 12 times to do the same thing.” Or do they hear, because I've also had this conversation, “I thought you meant I needed to be more perfect. I couldn't get anything wrong. I couldn't do anything wrong.” Not exactly in that many words.
Anne: I can see that. That's kind of good. Being clear about that also reminds me of one of the four agreements: never make assumptions. That's another hard one, because when you assume that you know exactly where they're coming from, and we don't. We don't listen with curiosity and discovery with no judgment going into the conversation.
Robyn: Exactly.
Anne: It's so hard. You have to keep working on that for everybody. That does change everything as far as what communication is. I think when you're teaching it, it's got to be an aha for all of your clients because for so long, we thought of a communicator as somebody who really knows how to talk. That's not it, right? It is really about somebody connecting.
I do want to start improving my communication today. What's the small shift I can make that will have the biggest impact on the conversations I'm going to have this weekend?
Robyn: If I could pick just one, I think it summarizes everything that we've been talking about, and that is: get curious. What if our first instinct in a conversation wasn't to try to explain, convince, or correct, but instead to get curious and explore? Ask yourself, “What might be going on here? What am I missing? What can I discover?”
One of my favorite, also very humbling, stats that I learned through conversational intelligence is from a study out of Stanford University. The conclusion was that nine out of 10 conversations miss the mark, meaning that the intent doesn't equal the impact 90% of the time. Isn't that crazy? Ninety percent of the time, our conversations and interactions are somewhere on the scale of slightly distorted to completely misconstrued.
Just knowing that is such a huge advantage because then we don't have to get upset or defensive when something misses the mark. We can be like, “Oh, this is landing. That's normal 90%.” Instead of getting frustrated or defensive when things don't land like we expected them to, we can take it as a cue: “Okay, I need to slow down. I need to get curious. Double-click here. What am I missing? Where's the gap? Where did this go wrong?”
On the other side of it, when you're the one going into it in terms of sharing versus teaching, because we get really into that, when we shift from trying to get our point across to simply sharing our experience or perspective, then we're opening up communication and connection versus shutting it down. Get curious. Simple, easy, and powerful.
Anne: You can learn so much both ways. You're not only going to be able to teach. It's not subversive teaching, but you can get your point across, and you actually are learning along the way as well. I think that's really key.
Facts tell. Stories sell. I like the idea that you said to be curious and then share from our experience. But we're not actually saying, “This is the right thing, and this is the wrong thing.” We're saying, “From my experience, this has happened,” and then just let them make their own decisions.
Even when you're trying to sell something to somebody, I think the story of how it helped somebody really resonates more than the telling of, “You need to do this. Yes, you need to do this. Yes, you must do this.”
I can see how this can be, certainly in a dental office, because they don't spend a lot of time having really strong, intimate conversations, when you really resonate with somebody, because they're busy and don't take the time for that.
In the dental office, is it really important to carve out that time during the day or during the week, like morning huddles? Where do you fit those kinds of conversations in so that the assistant knows it's not to be really fast; it's the patient care and communicating with the patient who's sitting in the chair? Take that time to have them curious about what a full restoration or complete comprehensive plan would do for them.
Robyn: I think that's a great question because that's always the pushback: “We don't have time for that. We can't have a 30-minute sit-down every time I dictate a new policy or a new thought that I want to try.”
It's a couple of things. First of all, I think not buying into the lie that it takes a lot of time because our mind will tell us, “I don't have time for that. They just need to get it or understand it,” and we maybe become more, “This is a dictatorship anyway. They just need to hear me.”
Well, it isn't even about that. I can think I'm being very clear, and maybe they don't even mind being bossed around, but they're really just not getting what you're laying down.
I think it's more a habit of assuming that you are in the 90% of conversations almost every time, because you are, where there's some sort of misinterpretation or a gap in clarity of what you meant and what you intended versus what they heard.
Instead of creating big blocks of time, which are also important, morning huddles, weekly, monthly, or whatever meetings, absolutely, those are important. But it's also the habit of stopping and checking consistently as we go. “What did you hear me say? Wait, what did that mean to you? Tell me the first two things that you'll do to make that happen.” How can you stop and check that you are on the same page or that they heard what you meant?
So just finding the one minute, the 30 seconds, the four minutes here and there. If it's something particularly important to you, then take the extra 60 seconds. Don't let your brain tell you you don't have time for this, because do you not have time for that extra 60 seconds or 90 seconds now? Or how will that look when what you thought was now going to be the dictate going forward is completely off the rails, and now you are weeks and months later and they're still not taking great care of patients in the way that you thought that they would or should?
Anne: So simple to knock that out in the very beginning so people understand. That just makes so much sense, and it helps everybody because people want to do a good job. No one's in a dental office trying not to be a good employee, I don't think. There are a few here and there, but it's almost like they always say, “Peel the onion.” It's like a little piece of onion every time.
“Did you hear what I said? Did you understand what I mean?” And know that the team knows not to take offense to that either. I think that's something because you can say, “Hey, look, 90% aren't good, so let's really try to get to 80.”
Robyn: If we get that down by 10%, even if that statistic was way off, even if it was 30% off, still half of our conversations are missing the mark.
One thing you said there just lit up another thought for me. When we are asking the questions, when we're stopping to get curious, make sure that our visions align, and we're thinking the same thing, and we're on the same page. Yes, asking questions, but asking questions for which you don't have the answers. Asking the open-ended questions.
Which sounds a little bit weird, but we tend to, like I heard you say, “Do you understand what I mean?” Well, they think they do, so their answer's going to be, “Yes.”
Anne: Good catch.
Robyn: We tend to do that. That's what we lean on because, without even thinking about it, we're assuming they do. Why wouldn't they? It's common sense, right?
Anne: Yeah.
Robyn: So training ourselves, and it does take some training. Everything that I coach on doing better, I'm still working on doing better myself. So instead, ask yourself, “How can I confirm that they understand what I mean instead of just asking them if they understand? Does that make sense?”
It does take some training, but once you start doing it, it gets easier and easier. In the moment, it takes less and less time. It's like anything else. It's a learned skill. It's a practice.
Anne: They're 75% good at their job. Everybody just needs a little tweak, right? And they want to do what you want them to do.
Robyn: Usually. Mostly.
Anne: But it also reminds me of the lazy way to say, “Do you understand what I just said?” They say yes, and they can walk away like, “Okay, done.” But if they have to repeat it back or say, “Yes, but I thought that you said…” then that's the conversation, right? That is the conversation. The open-ended question. I’ve got to remember that one too.
There's so much I have to write. I'm going to tattoo some of this stuff on my wrist so I can remember it when I go out in the world.
Robyn: One thing I tell people about asking questions for which you don't have answers is that sometimes it's hard to come up with that on the spot, so I use the term “double-clicking.” If in the moment, within a conversation, I can't think of a question I don't have an answer for, because we kind of do that. We shake our head yes: “So, you get it? You understand?” And we think we know the answer: “Yes, I understand.”
I coach something that I call double-clicking, or this is what I learned from Judith: double-clicking. If I can't think of an open-ended question that isn't putting them in a hole, or I don't have an expectation and I'm trying to discover, understand, stand under their umbrella, get their vision, and have them repeat back all the things, I use double-clicking.
Most people understand what it means. Anne, if I were to ask you, if you were to double-click on something, what does that usually mean to you?
Anne: Just hitting it twice.
Robyn: And to do what? Because normally we're on our computers and we double-click.
Anne: To save, copy, understand.
Robyn: That's true. You could double-click to save and copy and do all those things. Good point. But a lot of times, we're double-clicking to get to the link, to get more information, to get the definition of that word, to go to the article, and so on. It's to get more information. “Tell me more.”
Anne: Like, “Tell me more.”
Robyn: So it's another way of just saying, “Tell me more about that.” People get it in the same way. If you say, “Can I just double-click on that?” people right away know what you mean. You want to go deeper. You want more information. You're trying to fill in some gaps.
Anne: That's a great way to do it without putting people on edge. That's kind of cute. “Oh, double-click.” I'm going to double-click a little bit when we get off here and just see how I can have that sit in my head. That's a lovely thing to say. I like that. That's good for the docs and good for the team members, I guess. Can everybody use that?
Robyn: Everybody can do that. Real quickly in passing, “Doc, can I just double-click on that real quickly? I want to make sure I understand what you're saying,” is essentially what you're saying.
Anne: That makes so much sense because why work on something that you hear all the time? You put a whole proposal or a keynote or whatever you're doing together, and then they say, “I didn't mean that. That's not what I wanted.” You could save so much time, and double-clicking is just a very nice way to say, “I just need to hear more information on that.” Very nice and respectful.
It's a good one. Any parting tips you have there, Robyn? Any more parting tips? Because I got a lot today. I'm going to be on my toes coming up this weekend.
Robyn: I would say, if we're talking about specific conversations, going into it with three words in mind: your energy, your tone, and your intention. Especially your intention, because if in nine out of 10 conversations, our intent doesn't equal our impact, if we're clear on our intention, then it's easier to check: Did it make the impact we were looking for?
That also checks us, especially as an officially titled leader or a de facto leader that people come to. It checks our intention. It forces us into a better mental space potentially, because if my intention is to get in and let you know that you screwed up and you should feel shameful, guilty, and stupid, and yada, yada, yada, that's probably not going to be really helpful.
How do I want you to feel and leave, and what do I want you to do? If my intention is to inspire you to do better, then what are my energy and tone going to look like versus my intention is that I want you to feel bad and go into a shame spiral?
Anne: That's really good for parenting, friendships, and spouses. All of this just flows over into all conversations that we have with the people we love and want to uplift. That's really good. Again, it was energy, tone, and intention.
Robyn: Do you want me to give you a great 12-second demonstration of how that matters? Because we can really say any of the same words. Depending on what our energy, tone, and intention are, it can come out completely differently. I can be, “Oh my gosh, give me a break. You're an idiot,” versus, “Give me a break. You're an idiot.” Same words. Really, it isn't about what we say, is it? It's our energy, it's our tone, it's our intention.
Anne: That's the perfect, oh my goodness. That is a great way to end this lovely podcast that we had today.
Robyn: Believe me, that wasn't very—
Anne: No, that was awesome. It just really gives us pause. I love that. We all want great intention, and we want the best for people. We can do this. We can do that. That made it very simple. It may not be easy, but it's pretty simple, so I'm going to remember that. Those are easy to remember.
Robyn, thank you so much for being with me today. It's great to get to know you a little bit better and speak on positive intent and intelligence, conversational intelligence, and all good things that we need to learn to live a great life and to do what we're meant to do in this life for the betterment of everybody.
I thank you so much, and anybody that's listening today, remember, ladies and gents, to keep doing you, and I'll see you next time. Thank you, Robyn.
Robyn: Thanks, Anne.
