[00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Phoenix Business Brief podcast. I'm Brian Hyde. Today I'm joined by Sharon Rea, and she is— well, actually, you, you wear a number of different hats here. You're the communication strategist as well as the founder of Core Communication Lab. And I'm going to ask you, Sharon, to please pick it up from there and talk to me a little bit about who you are and what you do. Help, help us understand. [00:24] Speaker B: Okay, thank you and good morning. My name is Sharon Rea, and I am the founder of the Core Communication Lab. My brief history is For 15 years, I've been a life, family, and communications coach working with families who were raising teens, a little bit of a transition there, and families going through divorce, which I was doing at the same time as I'm learning this business. And what I found is, is that people try their best, but we just don't know how to communicate with each other very well. And over time of facilitating and writing programs and working with businesses, nonprofits, and families, I started the Core Communication Lab. And my goal is to make it a laboratory. So I'm not delivering a workshop. You actually come into the lab, virtual or in person, and you learn about yourself because you are in control of your communication. [01:20] Speaker A: Now, I have to ask, because CORE is spelled out like, like an acronym, can you break that down for me and tell me what does that stand for? [01:28] Speaker B: Yes, thank you, Brian. CORE stands for C Create connection. O is own your voice. R is respect differences. And my two differences, it's not a global, so it's not cultural, it's personality and generational. And then engage new patterns so that you, all that information you've gleaned from the C, O, and R, you now change the way you communicate. [01:57] Speaker A: So let's talk about where, where communication is going to come in handy. I have a feeling this is going to encompass most areas of our life, but, um, you are the expert here, Sharon. Um, when it comes to communication problems, what are some of the more common things that you help people deal with? [02:14] Speaker B: I help them know, like I said, communication starts with you, and often we develop our communication style from either our parents what we've been taught in college, what we've adapted to in a business environment. And it may work for you or it may not. And so what I invite people to do is learn about yourself, baby. Um, what are your fears? What is your trust level with yourself and other people? Where are your healthy or unhealthy boundaries? What do you do for self-care? Because when we are not in a calmer place, or at least an aware place that we're stressed or we're distracted, then our communication often goes off the rails. [03:01] Speaker A: So talk to me about communication capacity. What does that mean, and where does it apply? [03:07] Speaker B: It relates to what I just shared— the capacity to be able to be in any environment, any situation, and know from your own exploration that you've done about yourself how to show up there. And so if you're in a business environment where you are uncomfortable or you're new, you'll know how to present yourself with a different level of confidence and not shy away. Rather, if you were in a business environment where you're very confident and you're boastful or you're speaking more, you want to cut back a little less, whatever works for your personal way to interact in the environment that you're in. Okay. [03:47] Speaker A: And talk to me maybe a little bit about some of the different communication styles. I'm sure we've encountered them, but we probably don't think about them unless we find ourselves struggling to get something across or to understand what someone else is trying to get across. What are some of the basics when it comes to the communication styles? [04:04] Speaker B: You know, it's interesting. Thank you for asking that question because there are a lot of them. There's Myers-Briggs with your personality. There's Strength Finders. There's so many. I use— when I worked with parents and teens and in divorce, I used a personality identifier called True Colors and Personality Lingo. It's just 4 different types. In my family, we have the dad, me, and my two daughters, and we're all four different. So it behooves every person— you learn how to work your phone, you learn how to do your job, you learn how to drive a car. It's important for you to learn who you are and how you communicate with the people around you. So four of the basic types are my type. I'm very, you know, I speak a lot. I'm intuitive. I'm not emotional, but I speak from my feelings as well as my logic. My daughter is a scientist, and she's in her head. So the road between her logic and her heart is a little disconnected sometimes. So she's not able to read the room real well. She's slow to speak because she's constantly thinking about how to deliver her message. My former husband, those, uh, that is, uh, Tay is a lawyer. And he's very logical. Things have to make sense. They have to be in order. There's no interrupting him when he speaks, and he's usually perceiving himself as being right and you are not. And then there's my younger daughter who's just, the world is free and my information is coming out how it's coming out, but she's also connected to her heart and her emotion. So when you're aware of your own delivery of your words, I now know that when I'm speaking to my older daughter, I have to pause more because I'm from New York. I just— but she can't, she can't answer even a simple question in the time frame that I think, which is, Lindsay, how are you doing? It really is that long apart. [06:03] Speaker A: She has to think about it. [06:04] Speaker B: Yes, because she wants to deliver the exact logical, for her space, truth of her answer. Me is pretty quick. I feel fine, I don't feel fine, it comes out So that cadence of delivering your message is a valuable tool to know in business and when you're interacting in sales, when you're just interacting with your family. [06:25] Speaker A: So I have to ask, what you're describing sounds like it's very applicable in face-to-face communication. We do so much of our communication though digitally, whether it's text or email or phone calls and things like that. Talk to me about how the principles apply in being a better communicator when we're not face-to-face? [06:45] Speaker B: I think what trips us up when we're not face-to-face is we don't get to feel the mood or energy as well online as we do in person. You can walk in a room and go, "Mm-mm, that per— I think I'm gonna stay away from that person today. They're not looking kind of right. I don't feel so good." But when you're online, you're more in a performative space, meaning that you've presented yourself in this little tiny box. Who knows what's going on underneath? And you're really trying to not give too much away of your feeling. It's mostly a business conversation. But if we remember, you know, dial-up, you had to wait a minute before you got connected. So when you come in online, if you can just have that little pause, the pause is golden. It's golden when you're listening to someone before you respond, you want to pause to make sure you filtered everything you needed to give an accurate response. And when you're online, if it's your turn to speak, pause and make sure you listened and heard everyone else first, so that when you respond, you respond in total understanding of what you're responding to. [07:58] Speaker A: Oh, that's, that's good advice. Talk to me about difficult conversations. I mean, when we agree with someone, or they're in agreement with us and it's all, you know, good feelings all around and there's no— nobody feels, you know, threatened or upset. Those are easier conversations than the difficult conversations where maybe there's correction that's needed or something like that. Why are those difficult conversations? How do you approach them? What's— what makes them a little bit more of a challenge? [08:26] Speaker B: I really want to drive home, Brian, the point that communication is in your control. What happened with me before I became this lovely person that knows more than I did 30 years ago, um, is I felt like I needed to respond to everything. And living with an attorney and working in a law firm, you feel like you're on the witness stand a lot, and you feel compelled to answer. But I have control over me. I don't have to answer everyone. I don't have to engage with you if I don't feel confident or comfortable, or I'm intuiting that it's not going to go well. So these difficult conversations can often be abated just by you saying, I'm not engaging. And so once you are in it, uh, I have an offering to people to use another acronym called SAFE, and that's to understand whether you're psychologically ready to be in this conversation. And that's an internal analysis, and it's very quick. SAFE is to, uh, excuse me, set the stage. What are you feeling? What is the other person doing? Is it— are they too close to you? Are they yelling at you? Are they being dismissive of you? That gives you some information. Then you want to observe, okay, is this going to be a good thing if I engage or not good thing if I engage? And then you want to frame that reaction that you've just analyzed. Now you either engage with intention, and that means that you listen more than you talk in those difficult conversations, because what you're listening for is where you can agree. Because when we can agree more rather than do the battle, the difficulty kind of dissipates a little bit. Or you decide, not for me today. I appreciate it. I have to think about it. Something easy that you can remove yourself from the conversation. [10:28] Speaker A: That safe approach sounds like it would be so valuable if you found yourself, you know, being verbally attacked. And it happens to all of us from time to time. Someone will sometimes say something really unkind. They're trying to shock us into responding. Is there power in pausing before you respond? [10:48] Speaker B: Yes. Superman power. Or whoever is bigger now in the future. Whoever's fit. Yes. Because we are in a society and a culture, Brian, that we have absorbed the, in my opinion, incorrect assumption that we have to pay attention, respond to everything because of this thing that's attached to our hand, constantly connecting with us, constantly, mm, give me your attention. And the pause gives you A breath to engage your discernment, to engage your logic, to center into how you feel. We should not ignore our feelings. Our feelings are our GPS. They are our greatest personal shift to how we personally feel at any moment in our life. And so, yes, please deploy the pause anytime you can. [11:49] Speaker A: Let's, let's talk a little bit more about your Core Communication Lab. Specifically, I'd like to know what makes it different from traditional communication training. [11:58] Speaker B: Okay. As you've probably gleaned, you have to combine two parts of yourself. That is your logic, your intellect, your brain. It's difficult to communicate effectively if you don't know what you want to say and how you want to say it and have some history or background or verbiage that is aligned with whatever culture you're in. Business culture, family culture, friend culture. You want to be able to shift and think and modify your words. But if you're only talking from your brain, then you miss the moment of connection. And that's where the C comes in for CORE is Create Connection. You want to be able to connect with that person on whatever level is appropriate for you. So when you are able to use your brain, your mind, and your heart intellect together, you then know how to read the room. You know how to leave if you're not safe. You know how to engage with confidence and courage and don't talk too much. And that is the power of the pause. And that's what the Communication Lab— because you're in a lab, just like a scientist, you're doing experiments. We never tell anyone they're doing anything wrong. They get to discern whether that worked for them, and then we support them by saying, hey, maybe you could try this, or this is what we observed. But I never ever ever tell anyone, because I don't know. You're going to be in a whole lot of different situations that I'm not in, which is why we want to build your communication instrument, which is you. [13:34] Speaker A: I love it. Talk to me about what you see happen when people learn how to communicate differently when they start implementing the principles that you're teaching? What are some of the things that you see? [13:47] Speaker B: You know, the first word that came to my mind was joy. I mean, wouldn't it be awesome that every time you have a conversation, you feel confident, you feel satisfied, you feel, "I did that okay." And even if you're not sure, it's like, "I said what I needed to say and I had to let it land." There's this confidence, not boastful, but this centered, authentic confidence that I can maneuver wherever I am in the world and I know how to deliver my message. But equal to that, I know how to listen to other people so that I am in conversation, because communication is not a one-way street. It's you delivering something and somebody else delivering something. So there has to be a tango dance there, hopefully a waltz, something a little easier. So, so that That's what I find in the lab that's very valuable for people and a new concept, truly. Because if you go to college or you go to a school to learn communication, it's learning how to debate. It's learning how to do conflict management. All that's great. Those are great exceptional skills. And I do teach those as well. But if you put the raincoat of just the skills and don't insert yourself underneath, It's just not a full-on conversation. [15:11] Speaker A: This is going to sound like kind of a weird question, but I have to ask it anyway. Is this harder for people who are smart and, you know, who know that they have good intelligence? Is it hard for them to sometimes step back and evaluate how they communicate? [15:28] Speaker B: You know, if you're driving somewhere and you take a new route, you feel a little unsure that I'm going to get to my destination. So people that are— and I am that also because I had to work in a law firm and do those things. But when you're in your logical head and you receive benefit from that, and you've determined that that is my value, but you're not receiving a lot of connection with the people that you're speaking, especially as leaders, you're kind of on the top, but people aren't respecting you in the way that they could. Then it's just a new road. And so what I invite people that haven't connected with their emotion or are afraid of their emotion or have been told their emotions don't matter, um, it's just a gentle or forceful, whichever their personality is, whatever they receive from me, because I'm able to navigate that. Hey, let's take a new road if, if, if you want a different result. [16:29] Speaker A: And last question for you, um, I understand you're also creating Communicating Through Your Feminine Archetypes, and unpack that for me. Tell me about what that is and what inspired you to begin that kind of work. [16:42] Speaker B: Well, I'm a woman, duly noted. Yes, we're going to make that clear. And I have evolved my communication over the years. I'm a little bit, uh, older than I look. And what I find is that we're in a time where our wonderful collaborators in this world, men, are finding that women are finding their voice. They're finding their power. And I don't want it to become a competition between, I'm a man and I'm the leader, and I'm a woman and I'm going to take over. I want us to find our collaborative space. And in order to do that, too many of us women have stifled ourselves. As mothers, we give, give, give to everyone else, and we are always last. In business, we shrink a little bit, or we're too boastful, and we don't have that navigatable skill to, to figure out which one is workable and necessary. And so communicating through your feminine archetypes gives these women— and I've done a pilot already, so I know— gives these women in communication with each other, because we're online a lot, and being in person really is a difference, um, to share and unpack their fears, to give their Queen archetype a little more presence, to give their Warrior one, to be willing to stand up for yourself, to give your Lover archetype the one to love yourself. If we could all love ourselves more, our communication would be a whole lot different. So I'm developing a membership online, in person, and I'm not sure quite yet. Please get in touch with me if you're interested because I love input from people, um, to be able to deliver this to all generations of women. Because our Gen Z and Gen X, oh my gosh, this world is not any, any, um, the same as it was when I was growing up. The fear of communication, the confusion of communication. Then there's the baby boomers and the others that are sort of stuck. Theirs. So I want to help all of us expand our ability to interact with each other, feminine and masculine. [19:00] Speaker A: So what's the best way for our listener to reach out and to tap into what you are doing? How can they connect with you? [19:07] Speaker B: Send up a bat signal. No, I'll see it. No, my email is sharonriaz@gmail.com. My website is the same name, sharonria.com, and I'm on social media, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. You connect with me there. [19:28] Speaker A: Again, we are talking with Sharon Ria. She is the founder of Core Communication Lab, and thank you so much for taking some time to join us today on the Phoenix Business Brief podcast. [19:37] Speaker B: Thank you, Brian.