Well, hi, everyone. I'm Daniel Williams, senior editor at MGMA, host of the MGMA Podcast Network. Today, we are gonna be talking about communication, but not just the words we use. We're gonna be talking about what's happening underneath those words, body language, trust. I'm gonna get our guest to tell me, am I trustful based on my body language today?

I don't know if I wanna know the answer there. But our guest is Pamela Barnum, and Pamela has a really cool background. Pamela was a former undercover police officer and federal prosecuting attorney. She spent years working undercover. And I wanna share this, living under false identities and found that where her ability to build trust and detect deception mattered every day.

And Pamela is our keynote speaker for our financial conference that's coming up. It's gonna be she's gonna be speaking March 3, and I'm gonna give you more details on that later. So until then, let's get to this. Pamela, welcome to the show.

Well, thank you so much for having me, Danielle. I'm excited, and I'm really looking forward to meeting many of your listeners in person in March. So and, you know, we're gonna dive into things a little deeper there, but we'll scratch the surface here a little bit, give people a taste of where we're gonna go.

Yeah. This is so cool. And I will tell people, your session is titled Crack the Code, three d Communication Strategies for Powerful Results. So just tell us, the background you had that I described, how does a person get into that sort of line of work? Where did that come from?

Oh, it definitely wasn't intentional. I started out as a uniformed police officer, and then I was fairly quickly recruited into drug enforcement. I had a bit of a knack for developing informants, getting people to talk to me, give me information. And so the people noticed and asked me to come on board, and I did. And I loved it.

It was ten years in drugs that I wouldn't trade for anything. It was a great experience.

Wow. That is so cool. Had you grown up so you went into the police force to begin with. What was your inspiration to go into that field of work in the first place?

Well, I had an uncle who was a police officer, and he would talk at holidays, etcetera. And every day was different on his job. There was he said there's in the years he'd been working, there was never one day that was the same as the other. And to me, that was incredibly appealing. So he said, okay.

Go to university first. Get a degree. And then if you're still interested, come back, and and we can talk about it. So that's what I did, and I never looked back.

That is so cool. I love it. I love it. I I have to ask. Do you have any favorite books, movies, TV shows, anything that's a reference point that you think just nails it on either police work or the kind of work that you did later in your life?

Well, obviously, the wire is really gritty and fairly authentic. Clearly, TV is TV. But I will say when I was growing up, one of the shows that inspired me and I loved it and, you know, my police life was nothing like this show, but I loved it anyway. It was NYPD Blue. I thought it was an awesome awesome show.

And in my drug life, I would say that the movie Rush, not the one with the car racers, but the one with Jennifer Jason Lee and heroin and drug dealers, that was probably the most realistic and partly because the woman who wrote the book, Kim oh, her last name starts with a w. It'll come

to me. Wallets or something like that? I yeah.

She was a she was a real undercover drug cop. She was a brand new rookie. They did it a little bit differently where she was from, very small unit. But in essence, the story is based on her life, and she actually went to prison for some of that. So it was really interesting to watch that story because I would say people glamorize.

You know, you look at Miami Vice and the glamor of all the drug movies, etcetera. And this movie was pretty authentic in that there's absolutely zero glamour, and it it was more authentic.

Yeah. I'm so glad you brought that one up, and we can get Kim's last name. I it's something Wallitzer or something popped into my I head that sounds like read that book about thirty four, thirty five years ago, and then the movie came out later with, Jason Patrick and Jennifer Jason Leigh, and it is it's a terrific story, everybody, but it's gritty. So if this isn't your cup of tea, if you're more of a cozy mystery person, do not read the book or watch the movie. We'll just tell you that.

Exactly. Yeah. Well, that is so cool. I I love mysteries. I love detective stories.

So I'm honored to get to talk with you. Oh, thanks. Yeah. So let's go to this part of it. It is the nonverbal communication.

I see different statistics that get thrown out of how much more we look at the nonverbal side versus what people say. I don't know what to believe there, but I want to believe you here. So tell us about that. What are you looking at in nonverbal communication? I'm kinda nervous talking to you because I'm saying, should I be really still, or should I show authority?

What should I be doing here? I'm having fun, though. But, yeah, just tell us about you know, what are you seeing? What are you picking up on when you talk to people?

Well, those statistics, you know, maybe the one you're referencing is that only 7% of what we say. And Right. It was a it was a research, you know, back from forty, almost fifty years ago that looked at a very small sample in a university setting. Clearly, there is no way to say that x percent across the board for every human being is this because that would be nonsense. We all communicate very differently.

I think the only thing we can agree on is the majority of our communication comes from things other than the word spoken. And when I talk about nonverbal, even though we are speaking, I'm also referencing the cadence of our voice, the melody, the tone, the inflection, how many pauses we take. All of that comes into consideration as well. Clearly, anyone who's ever been a parent or around small children, they can know instantly if a cry means they want attention or if there's something really serious going on. And, you know, for anyone who's been in a a a romantic relationship and your partner says they're fine, how they say they're fine tells you everything about the rest of your day.

So we all know that there are these nuances that we pick up on, but there are some things that we can look to more than others that really will help elevate our interpretation of what's happening. I think we've probably all walked away from conversations and thought, you know, that went really, really well. Only to find out it didn't really go well because it didn't work out the way you thought it was gonna work out. You misread some of the signals. But if you were in the moment so when you mentioned, you know, me watching you, frankly, I'm probably watching me more than anything else because I as humans, we are so self absorbed

Right. That Right.

When we're in a conversation, as you're speaking, I'm thinking, okay, what am I gonna say next? So I'm missing cues because I'm concerned about how I'm coming across, what I wanna say. The lawyer in me comes out, okay, how do I move the conversation so I can cross examine them and get them over into this area? And that takes a lot of practice to step back from that and really put all of our attention into the other person that we're communicating with, whether it's online or in person.

Sure. So you're going to be speaking to health care professionals. These are health care leaders. It is our financial conference. A lot of the people there, most of them are going to be working with the dollars and cents of practices in one way or another, or data points that relate to that revenue.

That's the very specific aspect of it. But when we just think about health care at large, have you studied different industries in that way, health care specifically, where maybe the communication isn't landing, isn't hitting? It might be physician to patient. It might be professional to professional. I'll stop there and pause and let you just share some thoughts.

Well, I've actually spoken at quite a few medical conferences, everyone from people who are running the offices right through to physicians and companies that engage with health care. And health care is really unique in that there are not very many professions that are studied quite as much as health care is, especially when it comes to communication. So I'll give you a quick example. Let's say we're in a meeting and health care, the timing is so fast. We're expecting so much from the system that there's not a lot of turnaround time.

So even though let's take a physician, for example, could be so interested and engaged in their patient, really wants to help them, has five minutes, is listening, nodding, as they're reaching for the door, or as they're checking their watch to look, subconsciously doing those things because they know they have to be in a million other places as well as people in charge of finances. You know, they have several meetings. They're meeting with various stakeholders. There's a lot happening with their time. And I encourage you know, we if we're in that moment, we need to give that moment all of our attention.

It actually saves time in the long run because we are better at reading the signals and the cues that come forward. And the other thing that I've seen that's really unique to health care as well as other as well as emergency services, frankly. I was recently visiting a friend at a hospital and signage everywhere. Foul language not tolerated. Violence not taught.

All of these things that, you know, I don't know if I saw those things ten years ago. I see an escalation in violence and in conflict that I don't think it was overlooked in the past. I just don't think it was as prevalent in the past. So having to be aware of those things as well is now taking up a lot of bandwidth and creating an entirely new set of challenges that we could spend an entire conference probably working through and going through.

Mhmm. Thank you for sharing that. And I was just thinking as you were talking. I was absorbing all that, and then it triggered to me that we have recently scheduled a webinar that's on disruptive physicians, people that come in and really just they might know the medicine side of it, but the bedside manner, whatever it might be, just treating other people respectfully, is lacking in some cases, to the point that we have scheduled a webinar for that. So it's exactly you're picking up on what is being seen in other areas as well.

So I do want to move to something that's in your title. You talk about three d communications. What is the three d part? Do we wear the three d glasses for movies? What's going on here?

What's happening?

Well, I love acronyms. I think it's based on my history. So the three d, the three d's are display decode deliver. And display is really all about what you're signaling because these are all three important pieces in our communication with one another that will either elevate it or decrease. And, really, the thread that goes through everything is trust.

And we're either making a deposit into our trust account or a withdrawal. The balance never stays neutral. So it all starts with display. What are we signaling? Our presence, our tone, our our composure.

It shows people who we are before we ever get a chance to get those words out, the message out. And in high stakes scenarios, how you show up often matters more than what you actually say. And there's been research to show that people are making determinations about whether they trust you or distrust, like, or distrust within one tenth of one second. And changing that becomes more difficult. So our display signals are key.

Then we wanna decode the messaging that's coming back. That's our ability to accurately read people. So it's noticing a shift in behavior or their energy or maybe the pace that they're speaking. Are there do they seem engaged? Are they disengaged?

So what do those signals tell us in real time? What are they those cues giving us? And then finally, we wanna deliver on all that. That's where our awareness around what's happening, our own self awareness, and our situational awareness, that's when we can turn that into trust. So maybe making some fine tune adjustments in that moment or taking more time to make observations.

That's where influence lives. When we can deliver on that, when we can marry our situational and our our personal, our self awareness, that's really when we can take it to a 10 out of 10.

Okay. For people like me with short attention spans, give it what are the three d's then they'd stand for?

Display, decode, deliver.

Display, decode, deliver. Okay. I'm gonna absorb that. I'm gonna live by the three d's from now on. That is that is so cool.

I love that. One of the other things that I read about that you're gonna be talking about is displaying calm confidence in different situations. As we know in healthcare, it can be emotionally charged, things can get revved up very quickly. How do you maintain that? It's pretty easy, because we talk about mindfulness and meditation some on our podcast.

And when we're on a mat or, you know, in a very cool place with yoga music playing, you know, you can you can kinda be kinda chill. But you get in a charged situation. How do you remain in that calm confidence area?

So being regulated starts in a place really from that self awareness. So when we're speaking to someone, if we're paying attention to how our voice sounds, the tone, the speed at which we're speaking, are we taking a pause? When we can regulate that internally, it comes across as a steady tone, measured movement, the ability to pause before responding instead of simply reacting, which is human nature. That's built into us as humans. It takes a lot of work to change that.

So in emotionally charged health care conversations, calm confidence signals safety, not only to the other person, but to ourselves and into our own brain, our mindset. So when we can stay grounded, it allows us to think more clearly, speak more honestly, and it gives other people that same permission. So now we're going to start moving towards solutions rather than simply escalation. And during my keynote, I'm gonna give some very specific things that people can do, and we're we're actually gonna play a little interactive piece. I don't want it's gonna be fun.

You don't have to do anything. You don't have to have partners. Nobody's judging you. We are going to have a lot of fun doing this. And it I find when people internalize it that way, so when they hear my voice, they see some pictures or some movement, and then they're actually doing something, we retain that information more carefully.

And I will tell you that I bring prizes with me. So I bring some ethical bribes in the form of legal stimulants like Starbucks gift cards. So we're gonna have a good time with that.

Fantastic. Oh, I love that legal stimulants. Okay. You talk also about leaning into difficult conversations. This is, for me personally, this has been a tremendous challenge.

I'm one who has receded from conflict and difficult conversations. I've gotten closer and closer to go, Let's address this. Because quite frankly, when I would see that I wouldn't go ahead and have the difficult conversation, I could feel it physically. I'd feel it not in my stomach, heart rate, you know, all those things. So talk about leaning into those conversations and how to address them.

So avoidance of things, and that's really another part of human nature. We most people don't enjoy conflict. We want to avoid that. But unfortunately, that just shows up as repetition. So the same issue keeps resurfacing, and that same tension keeps appearing and oftentimes gets even worse.

And then misunderstandings happen. And what happens if we're not honest in a respectful way, what can happen is people start filling in the blanks themselves. You know, anyone who's ever, you know, had a dinner plan with someone and they didn't get a callback or somebody missed an appointment, we start filling our brain with all of these things as people don't like and they're they're judging and all of that as opposed to, you know, wow, the weather could have been terrible or whatever. Our brain always goes to the most negative. So that is often a signal that real conversations haven't happened yet.

So leaning in is when we can have a conversation that's really shrouded in respect. If respect is your number one motive, then that conversation is gonna be much easier. Not only not always people wanna hear what you have to say, but you demonstrate your respect for them and their ability to manage by having an open conversation. I don't believe in that whole sandwich thing where they say, you know, give somebody something nice and then tell them what you really want and then end with something nice. Everybody is on to that at this point.

So people just don't even listen to the good stuff because they know here comes the bad stuff, and then they're gonna give me some blow off at the end. Yeah. And that it's not effective, and it's not authentic to who we are.

So Right.

I was once and I'll share a story if if time permits at the keynote, but I met a drug dealer once many, many years ago. And he gave me a a theory that I have never been able to disprove. And he said, look. People are really motivated by one of three things. And he said it much differently, but clearly in a corporate setting, I'm gonna take a spin on it.

So first one is money. Obviously, people are highly driven money finances. The next is love or lust or some emotion around that where, you know, parents will run into a burning building. They ignore their own personal safety for that emotional driver. But the third one that really trumps the first two and actually runs through the first two is respect.

And when we feel respected, we will often forgive people for things. We will give much more grace. We will hear things differently when we respect it. So think of a conversation you've had with someone that you respected very, very much, and they may have told you something you didn't necessarily wanna hear, but you took it in. As opposed to you could have heard the identical thing from someone you don't have any respect for, and you you've interpreted it very negatively, very, very differently.

So if we can approach people with respect, and, again, I'm going to give some verbal and nonverbal cues that will elevate that respect, then our messaging lands much better. And it's authentic to who we are. It's authentic to how we speak to people because we're all going to express that differently. But you know what respect feels like. I know what respect feels like.

And it's a really a universal thing. So we'll go through some of those tactics as well, but that's that's my number one key for that.

I love that. And it speaks to something I saw when there was a recent one of the recent, elections that came about. They stripped away the person's name, you know, and so they had people read it, and they, you know, said they agreed or didn't, and they showed them the name. And if it was who they were voting for, they went, yeah. And if they didn't, they quickly changed their mind and went, no.

No. That guy's a jerk. You know, whatever. So it just shows that so much is built in there. I want to ask you something.

I've been thinking about this. We're talking about the nonverbal cues. I've seen this sort of portrayed in movies and TV shows before, but when someone gets known as someone who can read those nonverbal cues, and then they'll throw the line in, you know, it's a personal relationship or whatever, and they go, are you reading me again? So I bring that for the purpose of saying, okay, if someone's going to go to your event, if they're going to listen to what you're saying, and then they start becoming an expert in reading people, how do they do it where it comes off as authentic and it's not probing where someone they care about or maybe a coworker's going, are you reading me again? You know?

As opposed to just being real with me in this moment.

Well, I think the biggest misunderstanding around reading nonverbal cues or, you know, dressing body language is people treat like a checklist. You know? If somebody does this or moves their head or what there is no single gesture that means the same thing in every situation. That that's impossible. What matters is context and then clusters of behavior and watching for changes or shifts over time.

So when people focus on patterns rather than just an isolated gesture, they're gonna read the situation much more accurately, and they're gonna avoid unnecessary assumptions. So there's the the television show, maybe you watched, Lie to Me. And the speech, it's really written around doctor Paul Ekman. And he recently just passed away in the last couple of months. And on his website, I think you can still go to the at paulekman.com.

And he has a section on his website where the TV show he talks about what's based on fact and what's kind of Hollywood and what that looks like. And I think people who are truly experts in this area and people who have awareness around it recognize that there is not one particular thing that people will always do. You know, that looking up to the left means that they're recalling something. Well, no. How they recall things is how they were socialized from an early age.

So they're watching their parents. They're watching people around them. They're you know, depending on their vision, depending on where they are in the spectrum. You know, that's gonna affect things as well. Substance abuse, all of these things, culture, absolutely impact.

So to draw that broad stroke, we're doing a disservice to the person, but also to ourselves because we're missing key information. We need to look for variances in order to be more accurate.

Okay. And that's really where I was going. It was you become a amateur expert detective kind of person, and then you're reading people, and then you make what you said assumptions. You want to avoid making assumptions and being authentic in that real moment, if I heard you correctly. Last question, because I know you've got a flight to get to.

So what is one idea for people who are gonna be attending that you would want them to take away from your session?

Well, this is one we won't spend a lot of time on in the session, but one I would give out to your listening audience is I want them to be able to slow moments down because that's when we can be most effective in how we show up and also in how we read information. So one of the most one of the simplest and most effective techniques is really this intentional pause before we respond, before we decide or react. So the pause is gonna create some clarity, some credibility, and it's gonna give us that calm authority. So when we can regulate ourselves first, our communication improves, the trust elevates, and outcomes can change. So it's something you can use immediately in any conversation, both personally and professionally.

People think that waiting two to three seconds is forever. But if you're in a conversation and I waited and then I continued speaking, if I took some moments like that, it wouldn't seem unusual to you. As I'm giving you all of my bandwidth so that I can think before I speak or even verbalizing that. You make a great point. Just give me a moment.

I want to make sure that I address that in the most effective way possible. So if you need to say you need a little bit more time or simply taking a couple of seconds to pause, that is huge. When we can we can actually slow down time essentially in those moments, especially when things escalate. That was my number one or not my number one undercover tactic. I'm gonna share that one at the at the conference.

But one of the tactics I used in law enforcement that was highly effective and prevented a lot of situations from escalating was when I would slow down my breathing just a little bit intentionally. Not like I'm at yoga or I'm heavy breathing, that sort of thing, but slowly. And if you are with people in person or even virtually, you will find that they will start to do the same. And as we slow down our speech, people, when they are in sync with you, will slowly start to do. And you can actually deescalate a situation simply by doing that.

Lowering the tone of your voice, slowing down the pace. It just puts people into a different as opposed to speaking very highly and getting high pitched and getting frantic with our body language, that's just gonna escalate. So we wanna slow and calm things down.

Alright. Well, Pamela Barnum, thank you for joining us on the podcast today.

Thank you so much for having me. And I also wanna give a big shout out to the show Narcos because my friend Steve Murphy was based on his life, and that's another one that I if anyone's into this, watch that.

Alright. We're gonna put links to all of these shows and other resources we've discussed here today, everyone. And as a reminder, Pamela will be speaking at our financial conference. She's gonna be speaking on crack the code three d communication strategies for powerful results. She'll be speaking Tuesday, March 3 from 08:30 to 09:30AM mountain time in, I believe it's Phoenix, Arizona.

And I'll put all that in our episode show notes as well. So until then, thank you everyone for listening to the MGMA podcast.