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I'm AJ and I'm Johnny.

Thank you everyone for tuning in. Let's kick off today's show. Today we have Erica DeWan with us. Erica is a digital body language expert.

It has a wide array of antidotes to all of the anxieties surrounding online only communication. Maybe the past year has shown you that digital communication can leave us quite overwhelmed and feeling disconnected from our co-workers and our peers.

Email anxiety and zoom fatigue are at an all time high in 2021. So we're very happy to be talking today with Erica about her new book digital body language.

How to build trust and connection no matter the distance as she puts it we're currently Q list when it comes to signaling our intentions in the ways that used to be done face to face.

We're going to be talking about why we're feeling so anxious and how clear digital collaboration can help.

Now she comes highly recommended from our good for a man of grant whom we had on the show several times in the past. So let's dig in and upgrade your digital body language and communication skills.

Welcome to the show Erica it's so great to be here now we talk a lot about body language and its importance in communication but we've never actually talked about digital body language and I'm sure for many of our listeners this is a new term that they may not be familiar with so.

Can you define for us what digital body languages and then we'll tackle it together we know that research shows roughly succeed to 80% of our face to face communication is not verbal body language.

But in digital world body language hasn't disappeared it is transformed we now infuse digital body language signals and cues that make up how we build trust or a road it in situations today everything from the punctuation use to our response times to whether we throw in an emoji to how we greet and sign off an email to our virtual video call backgrounds are all signals and cues that matter in our modern world.

Something you mentioned that that spark my attention I saw recently an argument online where somebody called out somebody for not being ready for.

Now they sat in front of their computer they turned it on and they got ready and they started talking but there was no aesthetic set up and we're now moved to a place where if you're going to be presenting and you work from home and you're on zoom then you should have a presentation aesthetic for your for your video for your zoom in many ways I think that 15 months ago most of us didn't think about our video call backgrounds and now.

And now it's a must have when it comes to presenting or building trust with others my general rule of thumb here is be thoughtful of your video call background make sure there's not something distracting or a big light if you haven't yet by a $50 webcam and some good lighting at the same time don't judge people too much by their video call backgrounds remember some people live in five by seven rooms while they're working versus others have expansive you to back beautiful backgrounds what's more important is that you're going to be able to do that.

And then it's a wonderful background what's more important when it comes to digital body language is how your show your listening and engaged then just how pretty your background may look on a screen when we talk about body language many in our audience understand that well it's not something that we're taught in school we pick it up from our peers we pick it up in norms the way we were raised is that the same for digital body language I mean how do we learn how to sign off on email and punctuate and response times and all of this complicated.

Digital communication I grew up as a shine introverted kid my parents were Indian immigrants so at home we spoke Hindi which men at school I struggled with accent at English and one of the ways I actually learn the norms of how to fit in was all through body language I would watch the popular girls with their head side the cool kids

and I was like I'm not a student during school assemblies and it helped me realize that it's not what we say it is how we say it and that's so much of how we mastered connecting with others now fast forward 30 years about four or five years ago what I saw was that many leaders kept asking the same questions questions like why there's so much misunderstanding at work or how do we better connect with different ages and working styles and what I what I realized agent was that there was no rule book for the body of our language in a digital world this isn't taught anywhere.

And so my mission with digital body language was really to allow everyone to have a new common framework to avoid miscommunication to get more clarity to create that culture of understanding and to remember that there is not one digital body language we have different languages the way someone from one culture may send something maybe different for the others in fact digital natives with when they see a period at the end of a text they think it's anger or passive aggressiveness

if my father sends that period at the end of the text he's just trying to write good punctuation.

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