Upon entering a new job, there’s a palpable eagerness and optimism to contribute meaningfully to the organization. Yet, with the passage of time, this enthusiasm dwindles, tainted by strained relationships with supervisors or higher-ups. This all-too-familiar story exposes the harmful consequences of toxic leadership, transforming dedicated employees into disengaged onlookers who actively oppose their own company. How can we disrupt this cycle and cultivate a workplace culture that prioritizes the well-being and sustained productivity of its employees?

In this episode, I have Laura Baxter, Founder of The Voice for Leadership, who has helped individuals enhance their voice, body language, and connect with the audience effectively. During our discussion, Baxter talked about her journey from coaching to publishing to becoming an opera singer. Moreover, she discussed cultural differences in leadership and decision-making, and superficial breathing.

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Addressing Toxicity in Organizational Hierarchies with Laura Baxter

Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I want to tell you about a story that I’ve both lived and heard countless times. This is a story of someone who starts a job and starts a job actually quite optimistic about it. They’re excited to do something, they’re excited to join whatever organization that they’re joining, but then, somehow, over time, they become really jaded, usually by problematic relationships with their immediate supervisor, with their boss or someone in a higher leadership position. And there’s so many complicated reasons why that happens but the story has happened so many times that it is definitely something that we need to address because I’ve seen so many people suffer through some sort of situation where they normally would be good productive workers but, as a result of whatever’s going on above them, they just don’t care and sometimes become actively disengaged, which are the employees, they’re actually rooting against their own company, which happens almost a third of the time. Quite terrible. And my guest today, Laura Baxter, is not only an opera singer and a book publisher but she’s also a speaking and leadership coach.

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Hi. Thank you, Steven. It’s great to be here.

So you have a lot going on. You have a lot of different endeavors, which is always wonderful. How do you manage all of that? How do you bring it all together?

Good question. I was gonna say don’t sleep much, but, I actually get enough sleep. I think the clue is that, really, I love what I do, and all of it, both of the coaching people on the presentation or giving talks or also helping people with publishing their books or whatever it has to do with helping people find their voice. So although it may seem like it’s a lot of different aspects of that process, it really comes together with just helping people get their voice out there, be it their physical voice, that kind with presentation coachings, their ideas in a book or in a talk, it really has to do with finding their voice.

And, of course, singing opera, you’re using your voice?

Absolutely, absolutely. I don’t do opera anymore. That used to be my life. I do still do concerts, though, and I wouldn’t give that up. I love that. There’s something, some depth with music, so, yeah.

And so do you think that’s something that most people are looking for in this life as people try to think through, okay, what job do I want, what do I want to do even in my social circles, personal life, family life, is people looking for a voice?

Yes, I do, actually. And it can be something relatively small or seemingly insignificant, just like wanting to have some recognition for what you’ve done in your job or being able to share your ideas and your opinions on your job and your everyday life or it can be on a larger stage. It can be somebody really wants to get an idea into the universe to change things on a larger scale.

And so back to the story that I began this podcast on, the one that I’ve been in and seeing so many times about someone who’s really disillusioned by poor leadership, do you feel like for that employee, for that person who’s just so frustrated that it’s distracting them from all the work they’re trying to do and everything they were trying to have an impact on when they joined the organization, it’s an issue of that person losing their voice?

Yeah, it is. You and I have talked about this several times and full book that I published, I’ve been co-author, writing quite a few things on presentation and that kind of thing, but the very first full book that I published is Dealing with Divas and Other Difficult Personalities: A Mindful Approach to Improving Relationships in Your Business or Organization. I published that one first, I wrote that one first in its entirety because when I was working with my clients, and it did not matter what topic, it could be a topic of they’ve got to give a talk, they’ve got a meeting where they’re giving a presentation for their board, or it could be as simple as communication difficulties within their organization, the one thing I found that held people back the most more than anything else was difficult personalities. In other words, there was somebody in the room, even if we talked about stage fright, yeah, even with stage fright, most commonly, they were like, “Ugh, but so and so is gonna be in the room and what are they gonna think if I make a mistake?” and so it also often has to do with individual people with whom we don’t necessarily get along very well. You mentioned something early in the story you were describing and as you said, it is incredibly common. There’s a Gallup poll that comes out I believe every year every two years on employee engagement and the last one that came out was 2023 and I believe, I’ll have to double check the numbers to be 100 percent exact, but depending on what country or which areas or which region like the European Union or the US or worldwide, engagement was only between like 13 and 19 percent and that means the people who are engaged in the company, which means that they speak positively about their company and they like their job or they like working at that company is less than 3 percent, and that says a lot. And then you get into the actively disengaged and the just disengaged. The disengaged is the largest group, so those are people who are not satisfied but they’re not actively working against the company. And then you got the actively disengaged. Those are people who are actively speaking negatively about their company and those numbers are just phenomenal. It has to do with leadership and communication and personalities.

Yeah, every time I see that Gallup survey, and I was actually just trying to look up what the latest one was because I remember seeing like a 36 percent number for the US and seeing that number actually worse globally, I always think about how much is being lost, not only from a GDP perspective of, okay, well, if you were to take, say, let’s just say it’s a third, a third and a third, for easy comprehension, so a third is employees are actively engaged, a third are actively disengaged, and another third are those kind of passive, those people, and I think it is more than that, I think it’s more common because I think the most common thing is like, “Ugh, I gotta go to work, but it gives me a good living, I got a comfortable house,” types of people. If we were to take, say, half the people in that category, make them actively engaged and take half the actively disengaged people and at least move them up to that neutral ground area, first of all, how much more productive every company would be, how much more could be produced from an economic standpoint, but also, from a life standpoint, how many more people would be happy and how much more good energy would be around us in the world to the point where people would be trusting one another bit more again because they’re in a more positive attitude, like the whole system could be in such a better place if we just improve those numbers on people’s jobs because that’s what people spend a good amount of their time, at least as of 2023.

Yeah. I mean, if you take the third, third, third, we spend at least a third of our lifetime eight hours a day. That’s not insignificant. Also, these numbers are sort of reinforced by the so-called, after COVID, the so-called Great Resignation, and people just realized, “I just don’t wanna do it anymore.” And if they’ve been happy with the circumstances, with their colleagues, if there had been enough bonding there, then there would not have been that kind of movement away from their previous job. It’s a fascinating topic and it really does show us how much need there is for strong leadership.

And while we’re on the topic of this, what happened after COVID, one thing that’s really baffling me right now is that we had the great resignation, we have all these labor shortages that people are talking about, it’s so hard to find people, and then, all of a sudden, about a year or so ago, people start to get really, really authoritarian, I guess, with these return to office mandates, and I, for the life of me, can’t figure out where that comes from. I get the idea that you need to spend some time in person and that sometimes just being at home at your computer, you don’t connect with people as much in some scenarios, but like people are getting, I don’t know, they’re just getting intense about it in a way that feels to me like it’s a counterproductive method by which they’re driving people away.

I agree. I agree. The positive thing about COVID and allowing people to do home office is it really enabled a new type of flexibility to come in as sort of a standard that we’ve never had before, which really opens up a lot of doors. I also understand fully and I think we all understand fully a company is paying a huge amount of money to keep up this building that they either purchased or they’re renting for their business and now it’s standing there empty. I understand that. The other hand, if the solution is to force people to come back into that environment, using the word intentionally the word “force,” that’s not constructive in any way. If you’re incentivizing them in a way that’s making them want to come back into that building, so we’re having these meetings or we’re having this brainstorming, not every single day from nine to five but there’s a specific goal that is going to be reached by this, I think that most employees would be more than willing to do that. But as soon as it becomes, “You will now get back to work in your office.” It’s fascinating. I don’t know, during COVID, one of our TEDx speakers in Nuremberg had a talk on how much space was then available, for example, that could have been converted into, for example, apartments or into a living space because there’s a shortage here in Germany that could really be used in a different capacity because it was working very well that people were staying at home for their home offices. We tend to go back into some sort of restricted thought pattern of black and white as opposed, so, yeah, now we’re at home because of this and now you’ve got to go back because it’s now time to go back, as opposed to really thinking about how can we use these spaces creatively? How can we — what is really the problem? In that case, the problem is there’s this building that’s empty, or the problem is maybe they’re realizing that there’s not as much innovation going on because you don’t have those exchanges. In that case, then explain that to the employees, “We need you to be in this room doing this and, the rest of time, you can be at home or however you want to work it,” but, as you said, it ended up being in the communication much more, “Go back to work right now,” and I don’t think any of us liked to be told that, yeah.

No, it just because I think a lot of us have had that scenario where at some previous job where you go into an office and you would still be taking phone calls with people in other cities and still be doing some things remote and I even remember before the pandemic at a job asking myself that question. I would drive into an office and not really interact with the people that much, I would just kind of — and even our meetings would be happening over one of these video conferencing services and I’d be like, “Well, why did I use this fuel? Why did I get up and get out of the house even when everything I’m doing at a cubicle or in an office is something I could have just been doing at home the same exact way?”

Yeah, exactly.

Nobody should have the feeling that they’re wasting time, especially not wasting time in the car, just getting back and forth. Click To Tweet

I think it’s very much the responsibility of leaders in an organization to be able to communicate very well what they need from their teams and what they would like. It’s okay to say, “I just would like to be with you all one day a week to just kind of see how we’re all doing,” that’s also acceptable, as opposed to saying, “You have to come here.”

Yeah.

They’re just different ways of communicating things. But interestingly enough, with COVID, though, and that’s the other phenomenon that sort of happened at the same time is it really depends on your personality structure. I had clients that were absolutely unhappy before COVID because of stress or conflicts in their organization and, usually, again, I tend to get these because of dealing with divas and other difficult personalities, these cases where there’s some sort of conflict, some sort of difficult situation, and then with COVID, when you get your home offices and everybody’s working remotely, those conflicts were gone. Even though they’re still working the same people, they didn’t have this tight contact that they had before so, all of a sudden, they were relaxed and happy, depending, again, on your personality structure. Others who then were very unhappy because, all of a sudden, they were very much alone in their office at home. And so it’s also the job of a leader to recognize the needs of their team players. I was on the faculty at Duke, the voice faculty at Duke University back when Coach K was the basketball coach and a bunch of championships. Anyway, he was known for his leadership skills and I remember an interview sometime in the 90s, early 90s, I’m guessing, where he was asked what’s the secret and he said you have to know which players need to be encouraged and which players need to be yelled at. In other words, we’re all motivated intrinsically or extrinsically.

Some of us are motivated from praise and if you tell me I’m doing great then I’ll do even better to get more praise and others are motivated by saying, “No, that was wrong what you did,” and then they want to make it right.

So you have to kind of know your team players in every organization to be able to know how to communicate and see what they need and make sure that that need is being fulfilled.

So back to the scenario about the diva at work or whoever it is, the person that you can’t really seem to get along with, what generally can be done about that? Because one of the things you said is it’s not necessarily this black and white, “Oh, that person’s evil,” it’s oftentimes just a misunderstanding.

Yeah, it’s rarely black and white. First off, and you know this as well, if not better than I, it’s much more expensive to fire someone and hire someone else than it is to somehow reconcile the situation that’s there, especially if that team member is very talented. Other thing is when we hear the word “diva,” I come from the opera world so, therefore, it was a nice word to choose, but when we hear the word “diva,” we tend to think of people who are larger than life, who really overwhelm everyone and kind of take over, come in and take control and very dominant. That’s only one type of diva.

A person who tends to be very dominant finds other dominant people rather normal. Click To Tweet

In other words, they think like them, they act like them, it’s easier to find common ground. For a personality that’s very dominant, the people that they find very difficult are more introverts, they tend to plan a lot, they need a lot of time to make a decision, they like processes more than just getting to the goal, there’s a different way of thinking, and for a very dominant person, who’s a planner, it is much more — they just think they’re not cooperating. They ought to be able to make a decision but they’re not making a decision. But the planner has the tendency of being a perfectionist and so, for them, they don’t want to make a decision until they know they have 100 percent the right answer. So you’ve got these two different personalities going at it and there are, obviously, many different variations on that. So for the very dominant person who comes in the room and owns the room, the quiet person is the diva. They’re controlling the situation because they’re not willing to sign off on this. And, of course, for the quiet person, the dominant person is more the diva. So it’s usually — that said, the diva in our lives, “diva” in quotes, is somebody who’s very different than us. There’s some sort of communication that’s different than how we would communicate and the goal is then to find a way to build a bridge to that person so that you can reach your goals. In an ideal situation, you can help them reach their goals and certainly that the organizational goals are reached, whatever the project is they’re working on or whatever.

Does the nature of the relationship between the two people, whether they’re two co-workers, whether one is a leader and one is their boss, essentially, impact it? Do organizations that really kind of adhere to a really strict traditional hierarchical way of thinking, can that get in the way of fostering this reconciliation with the person, whoever is the person at the higher position, just thinking that the person that has a problem with them should just do what they say because that’s how hierarchy works?

Yeah, just shut up and do what they’re told kind of thing, yeah. In general, traditional hierarchical systems are not as effective, especially in today’s world. And with that, I mean, also when you’ve got a lot of virtual teams, and even before COVID, it’s important to realize that 80 percent of businesses before COVID had some form of virtual teams and so this is not a new phenomenon, it’s just that more people are doing it now. Especially in that case, you need to have flatter hierarchies. Because somebody who is working remotely from you and where the home base is for the company, that person needs to be self-motivated, that person needs to be able to organize themselves so you’re talking about a much more flatter hierarchy. So, alone, when we think of traditional hierarchies where you’ve got this person is responsible to this person, this person to this person, etc., in modern times, that’s pretty slow. It’s not nearly as effective. And there’s a tendency, as you said, a very strong tendency, to get into power plays and control issues that just don’t need to happen.

And with some of these workforce transformations, and when I think about transformation, I think this kind of global one where people are moving away from that model and moving towards one where they’re engaging services like yours, learning more about how to be an effective leader, how to motivate people, how to find your voice, how to help the people you lead find their voices and stuff like that. Do you notice any kind of difference between what you observe when you come to the US versus what you observe in Germany?

Yeah. I mean, my clients are pretty much worldwide so I have clients in Asia, in India, I have clients all over Europe as well as the US and Canada as well. I mean, the German culture, specifically, the difficulties here, I would say the hierarchical system is a little bit stronger here than in the US. It used to be a lot stronger. That seems to be also kind of evening out a little bit. One of the biggest challenges in Germany is the culture itself has a very strong need for security. In other words, you don’t really — Germans are really good at perfecting things and there’s a very strong perfectionist tendency, but in the society, it’s kind of frowned upon to make a mistake. In the US, we don’t want to make mistakes either and we do everything we can not to but there’s much more of a “just do it, just try it out, let’s see if it works or not” attitude and that doesn’t happen in Germany, and that held Germany back. I mean, one of the most obvious examples is in the automobile industry. You think of Germany as being a leading nation in the automobile industry but they were way behind when it came to hybrid cars and electric cars. They really had to play catchup, especially both with the Japanese and American market and car manufacturers. And the reason for that is they didn’t want to take a bet on something that wasn’t sure, it could go wrong and who’s going to be blamed when it goes wrong? That kind of mistake, what we call it mistake culture, how a company or how a corporate culture or an organizational culture handles mistakes is a huge issue in all of this. And in Germany, there’s this strong need to be perfect.

Yeah, we have that kind of like California, Silicon Valley, stereotypically attitude of like, “Oh, just throw something up the wall, break something, we’ll try it,” which is like, one of the reasons I know different people have different feelings about Elon Musk but one of the reasons that California USA is where he went to to pursue all of the things he wanted to pursue.

It is, and you saw it also with even centuries ago, even with Thomas Edison, for example, just try something out, let’s take this — does this light bulb work? No? Okay, throw it away, try this one. I don’t know how many hundreds of times he could have experimented, and that’s a very typical American attitude of just try it and see if it works. If it doesn’t work, then we’ll do it again, that kind of thing, and that’s not German. There are other European countries that’s closer to but not Germany. Even India is much more careful than the US. They plan more than we do in the US.

Is there any other parts of the world where you’re seeing this type of culture emerge as you work with companies all over Asia and Canada as well?

In Asia, the hierarchies are still stronger than in Europe, for certainly here in Germany and in the US. And, also, one of the largest differences and challenges there is a feeling of collectiveness. So the whole decision making process in Asia is a much slower process, depending, of course, which country, etc. Asia is also very large. In general, it’s a much slower process even than in Germany. If you’re an American company, imagine that’s a fast decision making process in comparison to Germany. And, again, other European countries vary on this aspect but I know the German culture best. The Americans tend to make very fast decisions and then see what happens, whereas here in Europe, it’s a bit slower, a little more careful, let’s think about it, let’s discuss it for a while and then make a decision. That whole process is even slower in Asia. So you can imagine, there are just communication problems that can pop up everywhere.

Yeah, for sure.

In both sides. Again, an American company wanting to make a fast decision expects a fast decision from other cultures, when they don’t get that decision, “They’re just stalling. They’re just not cooperating,” all these different stories that we tell ourselves come up, blaming them, when it’s just a cultural difference with people, a personality difference.

Culture difference across different countries can also show up across different organizations and even in any communication, like in any aspect of your life, and, oftentimes, when you think someone’s being a jerk and you start getting heated, that’s when you start going home complaining to your spouse, complaining to your friends and your family, “Oh, my God, this person’s just making my life miserable, they’re terrible,” it’s usually because they’re coming from a different starting point about expectations that haven’t really been communicated.

Yeah, you just said a key word, expectations, and one of the most important things with every communication we do, in everyday communication as well as company-wide, whatever, is to set the expectations, to express the expectations of each person involved. Person A says, “My expectations are this,” and person B says, “Oh, okay, my expectations are this,” and if you know what the expectations are, it’s a wonderful start to being able to communicate very well. And one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to assume. I mean, forgive my French, there’s that old saying about assume is assume, you make an, out of you and me, something, that’s very true.

When we make assumptions, I think I know what you think or what you were intending, if I think I know what your intention is and I’m acting according to my assumption and not asking you what is your intention, what is your expectation, then there’s going to be miscommunications that just happen and that’s unnecessary.

That’s just the main thing, it’s just not necessary.

And so what do you recommend to your organizations that you work with, that the leaders are the ones responsible for facilitating or making sure that these conversations about who’s coming from where, who’s assuming what happened so that we have a better understanding if there’s any kind of other conflicts that go on.

Yeah, 100 percent. 100 percent. And the larger organizations will often kind of shove that particular responsibility on to HR and that’s just the wrong thing, because then the HR is coming to a strange role of just being sort of the conflict managers as opposed to the leaders actually taking responsibility themselves. And, yes, 100 percent. And it’s not easy. I mean, the whole thing about leadership is you are the people manager at that point.

If you’re in a leadership position, how the organization, how the teams function together, that’s your primary responsibility. Click To Tweet

And there are responsibilities to the outside world but those, whether or not you succeed there, is dependent on how well you work with your teams. And that has to do with communication at every aspect.

One of the things that I observe about TED Talks, and I go to the local TED talks here in Denver quite a bit, it’s one of the things I’ve loved seeing and even love seeing online is that their communication is so effective. I’ve been at so many presentations in many other capacities where you just get bored and the thing I noticed about TED Talks is I would rarely get bored, even sometimes when it would be the topic that’s not necessarily one of my favorite topics but just something like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” How much of it in this leadership role is it finding ways to like what you do when you coach TED speakers communicate in this effective way that’s engaging, understanding vocal inflection, understanding how to cater the speech to your audience, all those things that you kind of bring up there?

You’re talking about two different things. A leader will rarely — an executive, for example, will rarely give a TEDx-style talk unless they really are given just kind of a 15-minute limit and certain parameters. Although it’s an excellent way to learn how to give a good talk, but your question about the voice and about inflection, communication in the sense of what emotions are being communicated through the voice and body language is so important. I just gave a TEDx talk in New Jersey at Cape May two weeks ago and should be about the time, about right now when people are listening to this, it should be released at that point online. My talk was discovering the power of your voice, and my main message, and with the TEDx, and that’s — I love the platform as well as you do and the reason I love it is because people are giving literally the top of their lifetime and when asked what I would like to talk about, it’s that your voice matters. And I mean, your physical voice matters. For example, in 2002, Professor Ambady at Harvard University did research to know, she wanted to know why some surgeons were sued multiple times for malpractice even though they were found of no wrongdoing and others were not, had never been sued. So she recorded the patient examinations of both groups, so these doctors that have never been sued, doctors who’ve been sued multiple times, and she found there was no difference between the content of what they’re saying, there was no substantial difference in the length of time they were spending with patients, or no substantial difference between their qualifications. What she found is that the color of their voices was the main difference, what we call the timbre. The doctors who had never been sued had a warmth in their voice that evoked trust in their patients and the doctors who had been sued multiple times had a sharpness and edginess, a tightness in their voice that could either be interpreted as dominance or as insecurity and that triggers something in their audience. So, yeah, your voice matters.

I observed people in many different endeavors, job interviews, leadership, you talk about the doctors, dating, anything else that seemed to be baffled as to why some people get completely different results than others with very, very similar tactics, and to the people who are more on the logic planning end, that could be a little bit confusing. When someone said, “Well, wait a second, that person just did the same exact thing and everyone loved him and I just did this and nobody likes me.” Are you saying that most likely, it’s how your voice is being understood by someone, whether it be the shortness of it, the tone, the pitch, all that type of stuff?

It’s a major factor. And so I should say the voice is always reflecting tensions in the body so it’s not just we’re hearing and we’re experiencing these tensions in the voice, usually, there are other tensions that go with it and because of the mirror neurons, most likely those around us are feeling the same tensions that we are actually emoting, if you will. A typical example that I use in my seminars is just if I breathe superficially and you are listening to and looking at me, I will automatically force you through my behavior to breathe superficially. Just because you will mirror my muscular tension that I have, you will automatically mirror. It’s what mammals do. And in doing so, I bring you into stress. If you’d like, I can show you a little example of that.

Yeah, that will be perfect.

Steven, it’s wonderful to be here with you on this talk. All I’m doing right now is breathing superficially but you can hear it in my voice, there’s this tightness, and, also, if you kind of — and even the people just listening to this will probably also start mirroring my body right now, which is basically a tension which will bring people in distress. Compare that, notice how it feels in your body, in comparison to, hi, Steven, it’s great to be here with you and, yeah, I’m am Laura Baxter, I can go on a talk like this and notice the difference in your body. You can also hear the difference in my voice but also feel the difference because as soon as I release and breathe deeply, as soon as I release and breathe deeply, then that allows you also to release and breathe deeply. And, interestingly enough, very often we say if somebody’s giving a presentation that they’re speaking too quickly, usually they’re not speaking too quickly. Usually, they’re breathing superficially because —

Interesting.

Yeah. So, if I breathe superficially, I can speak as slowly as I like, it’s always going to seem hectic no matter what I do. And if I’m breathing deeply, I can speak as quickly as I like and it won’t seem hectic. So these are things that we all need to understand about the voice and be able to control.

That’s fascinating because I could feel it in myself, like when you were breathing superficially, I felt like I was at a really hectic coffee shop in midtown Manhattan again and everyone was like, “Get out of my way, I’m walking here, I gotta get to work,” and then when you went back to normal breathing or deeper breathing, I felt, okay, I can breathe, no one’s telling me I’m too slow, even though it wasn’t even the speed but that slowness versus fastness kind of came through and that’s something that I had been told a lot being originally from New York, my natural tendency is to start talking faster, kind of like what I’m doing now, and people tell me slow down but it probably comes naturally if I just start breathing differently.

Because the way you’re breathing right now, you’re breathing deeply so you could actually speak pretty quickly and it wouldn’t seem unnatural. It’s predominantly, we tighten up the upper abs, what happens predominantly with superficial breathing. Soon as that happens, then we all get into a rather strong state of stress. The fun thing, this is a little off topic, the fun thing is I come from the theater, there are no rules. Nothing is right and wrong.

Everything we do is decided by what emotion we want to evoke in our audience, so if I want to evoke stress, then I breath superficially and it automatically causes stress, and then to release that stress, you just release that tension.

So it’s fascinating. It really is, and that’s just one aspect of what we work when you work on the voice. And the more you work on it, the more possibilities there are as far as better communication.

And if someone did want to work on their voice, their leadership, what will be the best way anyone listening can get ahold of you?

Go to my website and send me an email. That’s the absolute best way. And also —

And the website is?

The website is voice4leadership.com.

Voice4leadership.com. All right, anyone out listening. And then one final question I wanted to ask you is that we’ve had a lot of new technology that is very distracting come about over the last couple of decades, particularly the smartphones and a lot of these social media and addictive stuff. Is that interrupting the manner in which we’re kind of picking up signals? Is that causing even more distress as far as how we’re communicating with one another? And is there a way to kind of try to get around that to have more human conversations?

Yes, it is. For a lot of different reasons. I think it’s getting better, quite honestly, because I think we’re all beginning to recognize — I know that about seven, eight, maybe even ten years ago when smartphones were relatively new and people were fascinated by it, at that point, I felt like family gatherings, more people had their phones in their hands or doing things. And, lately, we just had a family gathering, the entire family in the States, this past April and I didn’t feel like people were doing that anymore. It felt like we were really with each other. And I’ve noticed that also with my son who’s Gen Z, he went to a boarding school because he’s staying in a voice choir and in that boarding school, the kids basically had a rule that when they would gather for a party or, this is Germany so they’d have a beer or whatever, even as a teenager, they’d gather in a room to be together, they actually would put their cellphones in a basket next to the door. And that’s from them. No adults were around. They didn’t allow everybody to have their cellphones with them, just because they realized they needed that personal communication. So the short answer is it has changed our lives in every way, especially in communication. My hope is that we continue to just sort of realize how not only cellphones but also how social media has changed communication, that we begin to kind of counteract those mostly negative aspects of it so everything from the algorithms putting us in a social bubble that we’re really not as informed, from that aspect to people giving rather negative comments anonymously online, to just walking, my cellphone is not far away, just walking around staring at the cellphone, that we actually get away from that at some point and really get back to us.

And to be there with the people in front of them.

Absolutely.

Exactly. Well, Laura, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, for sharing all the different ways that we can kind of try to be more effective in our communication with one another, our leadership as well as the fascinating example of this superficial breathing. That’s something I’m definitely going to be thinking quite a bit about as far as how my interactions with all the people around me go. And I would also like to thank everyone out there listening to Action’s Antidotes and, hopefully, you’re getting inspired to go out there and be a better person, communicate better, and build the life that you truly want.

Thank you so much, Steven.

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About Laura Baxter

Laura Baxter, opera singer, international keynote speaker, performance coach, and author, has been studying the effect of voice and body language on nonverbal communication and leadership for over 25 years. She combines her experience and knowledge to help her clients communicate better and be more confident, authentic, and persuasive. In her work, presence is the key to success – whether onstage, giving presentations, or dealing with others. She helps her clients find their voice and own the room.

Laura Baxter was on the voice faculty at Duke University and has been on the faculty of the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, Germany, since 1999. She is the author of several books, including Dealing with Divas and Other Difficult Personalities: A Mindful Approach to Improving Relationships in Your Business or Organization! As a keynote speaker and singer, she has performed on stage, on radio and on television, and she was the singing voice for Faye Dunaway in the feature film The Handmaid’s Tale. In her keynotes, she masterfully combines music and storytelling with business and leadership themes such as “The Art of Persuasion”, “The CARMEN Effect,“ “Trust: The Most Important Leadership Element,” “Dealing with Divas and Other Difficult Personalities,” and “The Opera of Business & the Business of Opera.”

She combines her experience and knowledge to help her clients communicate better and be more confident, authentic, and persuasive. In her work, presence is the key to success – whether onstage, giving presentations, or dealing with others. She helps her clients find their voice and own the room.