Richard Lloyd Jones: This is Therapy for the World.
Susan Berkley: The shy person is actually feeling like they're quite above everybody else, but what's really going on is the shy person is refusing to share. That's an actual deliberate unconscious act.
Richard: The Therapy for the World podcast is a production of the Keppe and Pacheco Trilogical Colleges. Welcome. Our Therapy for the World podcast today features an interview with Susan Berkley, president of the Great Voice Company in New York.
Susan's an accomplished broadcaster, best-selling author of Speak to Influence: How to Unlock the Hidden Power of Your Voice, and the coach to thousands of voiceover actors and presenters in all types of formats, from video to stage to online conferences and seminars. She's a leadership and training consultant, the signature voice of Citibank, and in a personal aside, the one who introduced me to Norberto Keppe's work.
So in a large way, instrumental in my being here in Brazil and working at the Keppe and Pacheco Trilogical Colleges. So I have a great gratitude to who I consider my dear friend, Susan Berkley. I sat down with Susan recently to talk about communication. Let's start with what you see are the most common communication problems that you see with your friends and family, your colleagues, your clients.
What are the common problems in communication that you see coming up every day?
Susan: Yeah. You know, I think whether we're dealing with emerging professionals in the voice talent field, which is an area you and I came from, we're both, I don't know how much people know about us, you know, but both of us are broadcasters by trade, and both of us are very successful voice talent.
You know, you are Canadian, I'm American, USA American, and both of us have had very, very successful voiceover careers.
So we're clearly speaking professionals. But I think the problems, no matter whether they're internal for you and I, we just perhaps have managed to overcome them a little bit more, or whether they're more urgent for people that have to speak professionally in any capacity, or by that I mean, or speak for their business or speak to be paid. I think the number one problem is a problem of affection, interestingly enough.
So good communication is really for other people. It's not for ourselves. And I think we could always start there in a discussion like this, because that's where all of the blockages come from. People are inverted, as always, since this is a channel where we deal with the work of Dr. Norberto Cappi. His great discovery is one of inversion, that we are not aware that we actually invert reality.
It sounds crazy, right, Rich? How could this be possible? We're living in reality, we got our feet on the ground, we wake up in the morning, we go to work, we do our thing, but yet we're upside down in so many ways without perceiving it. And not only are we upside down, but we have a psychological aversion to doing what's right. So communication, the purpose of communication should actually be to give affection to somebody else, to share, to help other people, has to be outward focused.
Yeah,
Richard: even if we have a message, you know, you have a message to convey technical information, statistics, or anything like that, the more connected you are to that affectionate part, that desire to help, that desire to contribute, that's what we mean. You know, it's not me. You know, I love
Susan: you, Susan. Little hearts coming from my head.
No, it's not what we're talking about.
Richard: No, we're talking
Susan: about not being boring. We're talking about being persuasive. We're talking about holding people's energy. We're talking about giving a memorable presentation. We're talking about being a good friend that people feel where we're really connecting with them. We're talking about not being a jerk. You know when we when we enter the room
Richard: you know sounds so simple doesn't it.
Susan: Nobody wants to be that guy you know.
Richard: You want to be a good communicator. Just stop being a jerk and you'll be okay. No I mean you
Susan: know what I'm saying. Not saying things that are embarrassing. I mean it's we could go on for hours about what it means to truly honor the gift of communication, whether it's the spoken word or even the written word.
But we deal of course in the voice, which is amazing because it's like every human being carries this beautiful instrument within them that hasn't even been optimized yet, you know.
Or it
Richard: must be. Yeah and when you're talking about the whole thing of being affectionate, like caring for the other people, being interested in the other person, that immediately moves us out of this narcissistic um box that many people are in. This idea that I have to appear great, I have to appear the best, I have to appear like I'm the the best speaker ever, uh or or people are looking at me, everybody's looking at me, people are judging me.
All of that narcissistic conversation that goes on gets sort of solved doesn't it when we have this
Susan: affectionate it. We're in a new era of communication and you and I Rich and I we work together for years. We give courses, we give workshops, we train internationally in English and in Portuguese. And it's so refreshing, Rich. I'm so relieved that we are no longer teaching people how to stand up in front of an audience and use their hands and gesture.
What a boring, what a stilted, boring thing, which is not to say that there isn't an art to good, there aren't stand-up communication skills, just as an actor has an art, a craft, right? We're not dissing that, but that is not the key thing. If you approach communication from the particulars, the particulars of inflection, should I go up here? Should I go down there?
How do I speak my words more trippingly on my tongue? If you approach communication that way, how do I stand? It's torture. It's torture. So you might master it for a particular presentation of 20 minutes or 10 minutes and afterwards you'll be so exhausted and never want to get up there and talk to anyone again because it's when
Richard: I when I when I worked in radio as you did for many years, when I worked in radio I remember that I I learned very early on not to wear two headphones, right, because what I found was uh when people are listening to themselves, and this is the same when people are focused on themselves, they're infatuated with what they're saying, and it's like you know you've got a little joystick and you can move the voice from one headphone to the other.
Ooh, that sounds really good.
Susan: You're that guy. I call that vocal narcissism. And it really is a thing. Either that Rich, either you've been blessed with a beautiful voice. I have too. So we might enjoy our... We are among the minority of people who actually like the sound of their own voice. Most people hate it. So if you, you, if you are, you enjoy the sound of your own voice, that's one thing, or you can like, can't stand the way you sound.
That's another thing, which I think more people fall into that camp. But the point is whether you love it or hate it, it's not, you, you shouldn't even be thinking about your voice when, when we speak, right? Uh, we, we need to be focused on the other uh and we need to be uh receiving a flow of help from the universe and expressing it through our speed, our being, through our being.
You know speaking is a full being activity. I think of
Richard: course what do you think's the difference in uh how you use Dr Keppe's work to train this, to teach people this, what's the difference in the approach
Susan: you're taking to the way it's normally taught. I mean normally we we hear techniques and as you're saying
Richard: you know people say okay so put a cork in your mouth and there's all these technical yeah which are great to do which can be
Susan: very useful, that they're not useful, they are great, but the point is you'll never get to be a a great communicator for any reason from the particulars, because the greater never comes from the lesser.
It's like when I tried to learn, when I first came to Brazil and started speaking Portuguese, the first thing I did was buy a grammar book, as if I could learn this beautiful, marvelous language with hundreds of thousands of words and ways of expression from a book, right?
And that's the first thing everybody tries to do. So you can't do that. And you can't approach an art from the particulars. You have to, and you know, the great thing about speaking is in most cases, if we're not, our voices are not sick in some way, you know, it's a natural thing. So we're talking about allowing our being to come through.
So we're not trying to make ourselves ever in good communication, something that we're not. And I think that's a big mistake people make, Rich. They think, I have to actually meet some sort of standard or sound a certain way. It's a recipe for disaster. And you and I have, we talked about this yesterday in an interview we did. You and I once helped a businessman in Brazil who, I'll tell the story real quick.
We got an urgent call from his secretary asking for emergency help.
"You guys need to clear your schedule. See him today. My boss is a mess. He just got a big promotion. He's got to make a speech to thousands of employees. And he hasn't slept. He hasn't eaten anything. He's a wreck. Can you please help him?" And we said, sure, come on by. And the guy comes in and he was indeed that wreck that she had talked about.
He hadn't slept for days. His hair was disheveled and he was unshaven and he was just a nervous wreck. So what we learned in talking to him was that he thought, okay, I've gotten a promotion. Now I have to sound presidential, right? But that wasn't his being. He got the promotion because he was a great guy. He was like every man. He had a gift for making people feel comfortable, for making them feel like they mattered, you know, and sitting down with him one-on-one.
He was just really real.
And I don't know where he got this idea that he had to be at something other than he was. And it just completely screwed up his, well, first of all, his psyche, but then his communication skills. So we disabused him of that and calmed him down and helped him work with his natural talents and abilities.
Richard: But this is very common. It is.
I think people tend to despise the things that come from the real essence, you know, because they seem so, I don't know, because they're natural, they seem inferior. So we think we have to develop, elaborate this enormous structure of acting, of mask, of appearance on top of what's real because we don't give value to the real things of communication or of life, you know, which don't come from structure.
They don't come from affectation. They come from honesty, from reality, from being connected to the essence of life, who we are.
I think we
Susan: tend to despise that. We do, don't we? We tend to despise it. And the point is, we already have it. We have what we need, right? And the point is that we're blocking who we are. It's not that we have to get something. The point is we're impeding something that we already have. And that's where the stress comes. That's where you immediately hear it in the voice.
The voice is, you know, there's speech muscles that are very sensitive to our emotional state. And if you're tense in any way, you know, you clam up, you know, your voice trembles or it becomes harsh to listen to, shrill, too loud, too soft, all of those things that make for unpleasant communication. But the cause is always psychological. So it's not that you have to get something or be different than you are.
You just have to start to see and become conscious of how you're blocking the natural expression of your being.
Richard: You have to sort of get out of the way in some way, right?
Susan: Yeah, to get out of the way. And we've seen amazing things happen. I mean, you especially have done phenomenal work with thousands and thousands of non-native speakers of English in Brazil and Brazilians. People don't realize this because Brazilians are so outgoing, aren't they? And so to the rest of the world, they seem like a jolly, happy, outgoing people.
Very talkative. But they, as a people, are very shy, especially when they have to communicate in another language. So, you know, ours is a therapeutic method. And that's what makes it so different.
Richard: So somebody comes to you, they're really blocked. They're like, they feel really intimidated about speaking, even in a simple meeting or much less a presentation on a stage. What do you do, how do you how do you lead the person through that process, they're really really blocked, feel really shy, really embarrassed, like ashamed.
What do you do, how do
Susan: you help them. The first thing we do and and I work a lot with people that are presenting on video, which which presents its own unique challenge because you're actually speaking in a very unnatural environment. I'm in a room, there's no one here right now, you're there, our listeners are are watching us and listening to us right now
Richard: wherever they are, wherever
Susan: they are.
But the first thing we need to do is conjure that other person and help and and you were speaking earlier about this problem of narcissism and speaking and I mentioned vocal narcissism. The tendency is always if we don't see someone else our reference is always internal and that's where the problem begins, that's where we start to have illusions of thousands of different types of delusions about what's going on.
So job one is always conjuring up the other person.
When you're on camera, it's a learned skill, learning how to see the camera like the eye of a person you love, a friend, and to conjure that person up and have them be there and really get comfortable telling them the story and listening for their response, which is often imagined. But you have to make it a one-way communication into a two-way communication.
It takes a little bit of skill, but it can be
Richard: learned. So you're actually helping the person to get out of themselves somehow and start to think about communicating to that other person. Because a person who's really shy, how would you describe the pathology, the difficulty of a person who's really shy, Susan? What's going on there?
Susan: And it's very counterintuitive because when we think naturally about a shy person, we think, poor thing.
What do we say? They have low self-esteem.
Or maybe they're suffering from the imposter syndrome, you know, whatever it is. We feel sorry for them. We pity them. But you and I, in our research and in working with thousands of people, we've noticed, wait a minute, the shy person is actually feeling like they're quite above everybody else and even a little bit arrogant and that nobody else, people just don't want to hear what I have to say and they don't accept me.
But what's really going on is that the shy person is refusing to share. They are refusing to share by not opening up their mouth and contributing to others, to the meeting, to whatever it is. That's an actual deliberate unconscious act. So that's a starting point for the shy person to help them understand.
Richard: That's a tough one, isn't it?
Susan: It's tough, but they have to be helped to understand that communicating is an affectionate thing Even if you make a mistake when you speak, you still have something to share.
You have a unique perspective. And so that's where shyness comes from. And they're also overly narcissistic, concerned with themselves, perfectionistic. Every word they're analyzing, everything they say, and not just themselves, but other people as well, criticizing the meeting, you know, this one, that one. And they're just not – they're overly focused on themselves and their performance. It's a
Richard: recipe for disaster. It really is.
I mean, a person, you think about somebody who's really shy. What are they afraid of? They're afraid of being judged. They're afraid of making mistakes. They're afraid of a lot of things that have nothing to do with the message they're conveying. It has to do with how they're going to appear or how they're going to be received. So many times shy people, they have this kind of really abnormally high expectation of themselves.
That they are really great or they should be really great. This is what Susan is talking about in terms of this idea of being arrogant, right? That they have this idea that they should be perfect. That when they do something, they judge it as saying, no, it wasn't good enough. So they're very, very demanding of themselves. So think of it that way, not
Susan: as in terms of being like, oh, I'm the best in the world, but the sense that I should be better than I am.
I should be better than I am. And not wanting to be natural, normal, just like everybody else. So when I say narcissism, it's think more in terms of perfectionism, right? And I think people recognize that about themselves. I think it's difficult to see that we're narcissistic in the sense that we're talking about here because it's a psychological attitude.
But it is, I think many people will recognize their own perfectionism. And that's a starting point. Because speaking well is not speaking perfectly, not by a long shot. And that's something that I always have to work with my people on. Because often a person will start to flow in their communication, they make a little mistake, and they clam up and they go, you know, but that, in fact, audiences want to see and interact with somebody who's human, not somebody who's perfect.
And that leads us to the discussion of artificial intelligence. Ready to go there.
Richard: Okay so you sure let's let's go this this whole thing because what you're saying now that people want natural. I mean everything's becoming homemade now. I mean everybody's making videos in their home so we don't have the big CBS production with the lights and the you know the lights, camera, action, the, you know, three, two, one is everybody's doing things, uh, on their own, their own kind of productions.
So needing to be like, uh, um, a news anchor for a major, uh, network TV show, this is absolutely not necessary now. And even not required. I think people are reacting with the natural, the naturality of people, how natural people are. So now when we think about artificial intelligence, um, what is artificial intelligence doing? It's trying to create perfection. It's like when you're, you're working in your word document and it Underlines the misspelled words.
It's like he's trying to make everything to be perfect all the time. So artificial intelligence is coming in really in a way to augment, to increase people's narcissism, I think, Susan. I think it'll work that way. Yeah,
Susan: it can for sure. Listen, it can be a tool, can use it to save time in certain areas. We're not saying that that's a bad thing, you know, to save time and to help facilitate our work.
But this whole idea that an actor, that a speaker can be, that the public will accept a cloned version of a human being, I think is like ridiculous. You know, that's because one thing that artificial intelligence never can do is make art. It's impossible for it to – there's no subtext. So I was comparing, for example, a narrator who actually had a clone version of his own voice.
So he made his own voice. It was his voice in artificial intelligence. And it sounded good, you know, but it had no soul. So he compared that reading a text to himself live reading a text. And it was like night and day because one thing a computer never can do is the subtext, the human subtext, because our communication rides on energy, Rich.
It's a magnetic thing, person to person. And super simple example is the way a friend or loved one says hello.
I think all of us have had the experience to call somebody and just by the way a loved one says hello, you instantly know how they're doing, whether for better or for worse. Well, what is that? It's one word. How do we know that? Well, the voice is the organ of the soul. It's the mirror of the soul. And that communication happens instantly in split seconds.
We're wired for that. And that's something a computer can never do you know. It's and it's what what hubris to think that that a machine could replace you know humanity, the art in human beings. I think it's such
Richard: you're making such a great point. It's like um language communication is not just a functional thing right. Yeah and so what what happens when we reduce things to zeros and ones, to this computer algorithmic mentality, we're thinking of communication as a functional thing.
I just need to get dinner. I don't need to make a connection with somebody. I don't need to have anything more going on. I just need to functionally get this done. So for that, artificial intelligence works. I want to transfer money from one bank to another, okay? So it can help me to do that. But language, communication, is not functional. It serves many more because we're not binary human beings.
Our communication is like analog. It's bigger than that. And when we're reducing everything to zeros and ones, like when we reduce music to digital numbers, we're losing information.
Susan: Yeah, I mean, and listen, listen, how can you compare an MP3 to a live concert? It's impossible. We take an MP3, it's the next, okay, it's handy, it's in my phone, it's in my car, right?
I can't have an orchestra in my car. But if I got the chance to see a live concert, that changes your life.
I think everybody watching right now can think about concerts they've seen or gone to that have been, you know, moved them, they'll never forget, right? So that's one thing. But I think the other thing, Rich, when you're talking about language, for us to become aware, there's a pathological part to that, too. I'm thinking about specifically about gossip. So this is interesting for us to look at, too, because words have power to them.
And gossip, intrigue, has been warned about even in the Bible, right? In the Proverbs, the elders have always talked to us about that. Why? Because our communications carry energy. And if we're not aware of our own psychopathology, we can do some damage, primarily to ourselves. I challenge anybody here, if you're a normal person and if you've ever, all of us are subject to gossip, right?
It's a human trait. But if you've ever spoken ill of somebody or been with somebody in a real gossip fest, we all feel terrible afterwards. If you're normal, you feel terrible. Why? Because of that energy. And so it's important for us to understand, well, why do I want to allow my envy, give it free reign instead of conscientizing, instead of trying to control it, instead of trying to realize what is it about that person that is driving me so crazy that I have to try to destroy them behind their back?
Those types of things. What about lying, right? And you in your research, Rich, and I know I've sat in your classes, you talk about how even babies can perceive an untruth and how all of us know when it's there. So these are communication sins or pathologies that are also interesting for us to observe. And we see it on the social level, like in the media.
It's a huge topic, huge topic everywhere in Brazil and here in the United States, and misinformation and political candidates.
Richard: Fake news. Big
Susan: news and candidates speaking ill of one another and the public unable to tell the difference or suffering from this. So it's a complicated issue but a fascinating one. And I think we need to start in our own world, become more aware of our communication and how energy flows through us and how we share it, and also how it's coming at us so we can filter things and really understand it better.
Richard: Sure, because everybody knows this. You don't want to communicate difficult communications through a text message. There's too much going on emotionally. You have to do that personally. You cannot duplicate that. No matter how many happy faces or these, you know, rolling on the floor laughing, these kind of little abbreviations we use, You can never communicate the complexity of language, of communication, of interaction between people through a digital medium.
It just can't happen.
Susan: It just won't happen. You know, our voice is a phenomenal thing. Pitch, tone, inflection, tempo, the rhythm of our speech, subtext. I mean, it's a miraculous, miraculous instrument. Uh and you to think that we could ever how we've suffered because of this it was okay. You and I grew up in the age when telephones were on the wall right.
And I had that princess telephone by the bedside right. And now look where we've come. You pick it up and have a you know a chat with somebody and now a chat is something completely different right. So but there are times where I think that's a great point. You wouldn't, certain communications, you wouldn't. Even people fire somebody over email, right? Or ask them
Richard: for forgiveness.
Yeah. So these are things that we get into in our workshops. And this whole idea of charisma, energy, we're trying to think about communication as an energetic expression.
And that energetic expression is not individually generated. It comes from somewhere. So when we're really communicating well with somebody, we're receiving energy, essential energy from the universe. We're not separate from that. We're not in a vacuum. So that aspect, the energetic part, that sort of spiritual part, the essence, the soul's talking, That's something that cannot be duplicated through artificial intelligence, through computers, because they do not have this, what we have.
They're not aware of themselves. They're just mathematical formulations. We are much deeper. Human beings are much deeper, and our levels of communication need to go to that level of understanding. And
Susan: I think our work is, the purpose of our work also, is to empower the average person to speak up and speak out and speak the truth.
I'm always reminded of Dr. Keppe's book, Liberation of the People, The Pathology of Power. He has lots of diagrams in there which show that, no, the people have true power. And the question is, why are we omissive? Why don't we speak up? Why don't we use that power? So part of our work also is to help empower anyone who feels blocked, who has something they want to say, they need to say, to say it in a way that's powerful, to have confidence in your ability to speak the truth.
And that's something that's not optional. All of us must do it as citizens of the world, you know.
Richard: If you have a message connected to goodness, truth, and beauty, you're accessing all of the energy of the universe. And you know what Dr. Keppe said one time, anything good lasts for eternity. Any good action you have, any good conversation you have, it's there for eternity in the universe.
It's not something that ends. So we're talking about
Susan: connecting at that level and having that kind of communication. That's very powerful. It's very powerful. So beautiful.
Richard: Susan Berkley. You know, I've been fighting to find the time. To produce more podcasts for our Stop Radio Network. Not sure I'll get to doing this weekly, but I'll do my best. You know what would help?
Your comments and questions. That would be motivating, and I think I could get Dr. Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco into that. She's insanely occupied with the bureaucracy of running two colleges, plus her extensive client list and teaching schedule. But your participation would be encouraging.
I'll see you next time on Therapy for the World on the Stop Radio Network.
I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
