Building Influence through Clear Communication (With Evgeniy Kharam)

In this episode of the Product Agility Podcast, Ben sits down with Evgeniy Kharam, author and communication expert, to discuss the underrated art of clear communication and its role in building influence. Drawing on his experience in technical sales and cybersecurity, Evgeniy shares why “soft” skills are anything but soft, and how mastering them can help leaders connect, engage, and drive impact. If you’ve ever struggled to make your ideas stick or felt nervous presenting to a crowd, this episode is packed with insights to help you feel more confident and effective.

Key Takeaways:

• Turning Fear into Excitement: How recognising the difference between fear and excitement can make presentations feel manageable—and even enjoyable.
• Curiosity as a Core Skill: Why maintaining a mindset of curiosity leads to better questions, stronger connections, and a more engaging presence.
• Communicating with Clarity: Simple strategies to cut through jargon and ensure your message lands with any audience.
• Breathing and Visualisation Techniques: Practical tools to calm your nerves, increase focus, and improve your presentation flow.

Practical Tools & Methods:

Box Breathing: A breathing exercise to help you relax, stay centred, and communicate with ease.

Building Rapport with “Hooks”: How to find common ground quickly and make authentic connections with anyone.

Quotable Moments:

"Communication isn’t about what you say; it’s about what others understand."
 "Empathy isn’t just a ‘soft’ skill—it’s essential to making ideas resonate."

Links and Resources:

Connect with Evgeniy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ekharam/

For more on Evgeniy’s work, visit his website at https://www.softskillstech.ca/ 

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Chapters

• 7:45 Fear & Simplification in Communication
• 19:53 Soft Skills & Self-Maintenance
• 35:10 Overcoming Communication Challenges

Transcript

0:00

In many cases, the difference between fear and excitement is the outcome is the excitement. We know the outcome is the fear. We don't know the outcome. So if you go on on the bike down the hill and you know the hill, you are excited, maybe a bit feared because you already did this heal several times. If you never did this heal on the bike, you're going to be scared because you don't really know how it's going to end or what's going to happened. And what I'm getting is this is, I agree, fear is good. And fear also can indicate it's something new. So if you need to present to a big group of people, if you need to present your project, your idea to new people, you're going to be a bit scared. And I think it's fine, but it's also going to indicate you that it's something new. I'm doing something not familiar to myself. You're not going to die. You're not going to approach yourself from presenting, but inside you're going to be scared. Now if you understand that every time you present your ideas in front of new people of bigger crowd, you're going to have this statue of fear. What do we say? If you understand the problem, it's a part of the resolution. Welcome to the Product Agility podcast, the missing link between agile and product. The purpose of this podcast is to share practical tips, strategies and stories from world class thought leaders and practitioners. Why I hear you ask? Well, I want to increase your knowledge and your motivation to experiment so that together we can create ever more successful products. My name is Ben Maynard and I'm your host. What has driven me for the last decade to bridge the gap between agility and product is a deep rooted belief that people and products evolving together can achieve mutual excellence. Hello and welcome to the Product Agility Podcast. I am your host Ben Maynard and today we are joined by Yevgeny Karam, a gentleman who is an author, an advisor, all round nice chap and someone that I've been looking forward to speaking to you because he's bringing bringing some topics which we haven't really faced on this podcast before. When I was thinking how do we start the episode, there was something in particular one of the Guinea's blog posts. It really stuck out to me and I think it becomes whether it's borrowed or if it's original, I don't really mind. But the one thing that really resonated me was this thought that how many times in my life have I really struggled to communicate something clearly and with. Simplicity to make it concise is something which I've always struggled with, especially early on in my career and I'm so I'm sure, but it's something that you listeners have also struggled with at times. So we're going to think about soft skills and how can we work better to more clearly and simply communicate to anyone in our lives. Now, Yevgeny's work has been around sales and soft skills, but this soft skills element of that spans anything really. And as Yevgeny pointed out to me earlier, we're all in sales. We're we're a product person, we're an agile coach, we're a scrum master at some point in in our roles, we are all trying to sell something. So Yevgeny, it is a joy to have you on the podcast. Would you mind introducing yourself to our listeners? Thank you very much. I'm very, very happy to be here on the podcast is quite a lot of joy speaking with you and is being enjoying on podcast. I've seen podcast in the amazing platform for people to share ideas, to talk about ideas. And I really don't like the very, very scripted one when we have planned everything in advance. I'd like some kind of angle and then we can go left and right. As you mentioned, I've been around for a long time. I'm actually, but by trade started as a very technical person. I was always very technical and slowly, slowly the sales part catched up. And for the last few years, I'm not just helping sales. I need to sell my own ideas. I need to sell my own consulting. So I'm definitely in sales. And you mentioned about of the all in sales, I'm going to even simplify it more. Not just selling the project, how about when we need to decide which program we're going to use to record if which food, what the food you're going to eat in the evening, where the kids will go to camp. You're always selling at home, at work. And many, many places we just don't call them selling. But in the end of the day, you pitching an idea, OK, let's go do that. Let's go do this. And one of the biggest things I've realized to myself as a very technical person, especially in cyber, that I have this idea in my head. And for me the idea is clear, because I didn't think you know this for a long time. But the moment I start explaining this to you, I may skip a step. I may skip it 2 steps because in my mind I already understood and you're like, what are you talking about? I have no idea. Like think about you put a developer and you put an accounting person in a room and it tells them only use the acronyms that you use with your bodies as an accountable developers, they're going to lose themselves and I have no idea what they're talking about. So we as a human being, when we're not talking to ourself and when we're talking to other human beings, potentially not in our profession, need to learn which language to use. Do I use business language? Do I use simple language? Do I use metaphors that the other person understand? You mentioned kids before we started to record and have kids as well. Can you use so very, very simple example just from life? We have the security and wireless part in cybersecurity everybody need to do. I'm sure you know what you're talking about. Pass the test, pass the exams. Can you open this e-mail? Can you click this file? People don't really like to do this with executives in many cases. Sometimes we need to do it face to face because this is the better to understand the moment. I, for example, do an analogy. So you're going to a park or somewhere big with your kids. Would you tell the kids in case you get lost, you're going to meet near this gate or here's my phone number. Find a security guard and call me. Yeah, definitely. Like, why? It's a basic security awareness, but for life. And we can create these metaphors and analogies as many as we want that will adapt to the other personal understanding and feeling. Yeah. Funny that we lost our children yesterday. We found them again. That's good. Yeah. We did a few. There was a moment where we did one day. It was just one of those silly things where they ran off and then looped back on themselves and we thought they were going to appear in front of us and they looped back. I'm like, where's mum and Dad? Oh, well, we'll just start walking home. It's like, great. Yeah. That was, you know, we found them. That's the important thing. But I think those 90s work well. And I think that it's it's a great way to get that kind of connection and the relationship as well. But there was something that you said, which is maybe when I say say, it makes me sound like a bit like a Stoner or something, but like. When you have those forts in your head and having a conversation with yourself and you think it's all crystal clear and then you go to articulate it. You know, sometimes I do wonder whether in my head I've got like a shorthand or I'm just talking in a slightly different way and I'm missing words out because sometimes then what I go to say. So whatever people can hear, there are bits which are missed out. We think things through, but yet when we verbalize it, we cut the story short. And I do often wonder like what what goes on? I think, I think a lot of people struggle from that and probably even get quite fearful about presenting themselves or presenting something or trying to pitch an idea or trying to convince someone or share some information because they've messed up in the past and they're fearful they're going to mess up again. There's, there's two lines here. 1 is the part of fear people may not understand. We will talk about this in a second Two, we kind of simplified in our head and because it's hard for us to understand how other person think, how we can know and they're all different. We all differently consume information, video, audio can study that in our mind. We just so focused on what's happening that we assume they understand or because we're moving so fast, because we have this attention span very, very short. You know, we have Facebook slides don't like like very, very fast notification as well is that we don't bother to slow down. Like wait a second, I want to get my point across. How's Ben will understand me? Is there is a better way for Ben to explain this? This is actually very applicable to sales and not just sales. Even if you present a new idea in the project, how would you do it? Do you use PowerPoint slides? Do you actually demo what you did? Applicable sales teams everywhere, would you potentially speak about this and understand the flow and how it's connect? There's multiple ways from where to start. How would you know? You need to understand what the answer people think and how they connect, collect information. In many cases we just say in the way we understand or in the way we think. They're not always going to be there and if we're not paying attention on the other person, then they're human reflections that we can lose are very, very quick. This why why is the weight and that you didn't touch before. There's a big problem we have right now over Zooms, teams, Google meets and besides teams not always working. We have a problem that what if I'm without video? What if you only see half of your Guinea? So for the last few minutes, you'll be doing what you've been taking your pan and looking right? So let's think about if you for people just watching us right now. But if I do that, OK, what am I doing? Am I eating spaghetti? I'm writing notes in the physical room. It's going to be very easy for you to see that I have a notebook here and I'm writing notes or I'm potentially looking on my notes on what I want to cover in a meeting in this virtual dimension of this video. It's very hard. So it's even harder to understand the cues. What if you on the call and people are without video? Even harder. This is 1 aspect. The second aspect is the part of fear and it's in a way a big problem. Now there's a lot of on the Internet. Let me help you to remove the fear, fearless and all this stuff. But honestly, is fear good or bad? What do you think? I would say, but if I honestly, honestly, I think fear is pretty good if being faced with a life or death situation, however you see, Yeah, on a streak, it's fine. If you see a line, you've better run, you know? Yeah, exactly. OK, now let's kind of be different. What's the difference between fear and excitement? Like you go on a roller coaster, you scare and you excite at the same time. Well, there's still some level of threat involved with both, isn't there? I think with excitement or threat or yeah, I mean excitement is a very broad thing as well as the roller coaster Excitement is very different than unboxing a new video games console excitement very different than the yes, yes, but because there's I hope there's No Fear for you to play Xbox. You know there shouldn't be fear. Well, I I I don't know you get the older you get, the harder it is to get on get on board on new video games. Isn't it just give me a nez basically 2 if you if you think about that, in many cases, the difference between fear and excitement is the outcome is the excitement. We know the outcome is the fear. We don't know the outcome. So if you go on on the bike down the hill and you know the hill, you are excited, maybe a bit feared because you already did this heal several times. If you never did this heal on the bike, you're going to be scared because you don't really know how it's going to end or what's going to happen. And what I'm getting is this is, I agree, fear is good. And fear also can indicate it's something new. So if you need to present to a big group of people, if you need to present your project, your idea to new people, you're going to be a bit scared. And I think it's fine, but it's also going to indicate you that it's something new. I'm doing something not familiar to myself. You're not going to die. You're not going to port yourself on presenting, but inside you're going to be scared. Now, if you understand that every time you present your ideas in front of new people, of bigger crowd, you're going to have this touch of fear. What do we say? If you understand the problem, it's a part of the resolution. Like, oh, every time I'm doing this, I actually scared. So honestly enough, I did a lot of public speaking and the first few years I'll lock myself in the washroom and we'll do breathing exercise to calm myself down. I'll explain which one I did in a second. But I understood, OK, now when I present, I still have fear slash like all this is not actually fear this exciting. I'm doing something new. I'm doing something that potentially interested and yes, you're going to mess up. So the one of the parts that I remember was what the big mess up for me. I was doing panel moderation about six months ago and the moment we just went live virtually literally there was like around 200 people. I had the blood coming out of my house and I was like, hi, hello. Today I'm like feeling like A and I'm like, I don't know if I cry or or or or what do I do? But like, OK guys, I'm very, very sorry. This is shouldn't be happening. Finalist Bruce, introduce yourself. Give me a second. So I thought of the video and kind of cleaned my nose and went back and it was really embarrassing. But in this thing I was like, OK, it's human being. People will understand, you know, we're not in Hollywood here. So coming back to fear, what can you do? Many cases when you're scared, you breathing goes up, you heart running faster as well. Even so you don't understand that. So there's techniques first of all. Now, if you understand that we may be scared before we're doing something like that. Second, we can use techniques to visualize breeze and we lost band. I hope you'll come back to help yourself to what's called get to the flow, get to the zone. One of them I like called box freezing. Original Navy SEAL was definitely somewhere back in India as well. And every breathing technique we find somehow for sure is coming back to India and yoga. But the idea of this box freezing is to slow down the ring. So if you, for example, inhale for five, hold for five is about box missing. Yeah, I'd there was somebody can my course wants to talk with box driven. But yeah, it's a it's a great. I think baby talk people through it and they can try it whilst they're listening. Right. Great. It's a nice idea. So inhale for five, hold for five seconds. Exhale for five, hold for five, and then repeat the square. What just happened? If the normal human being breathing pattern rate is about 12 to 15 to 20 a minute with doing 5 for each, we just move it to three because every cycle is not 22nd. What's going to happen if you do this breathing technique for 2345 minutes? You will calm yourself down. You bring down the heart rate significantly and guess what happened? You will in many cases start clearly understand what's what's going on. You will in many cases understand, OK, this is here. This anxiety I have right now, it's OK. Just indicating I'm excited will help you to go in to what you need to do whatever you need to do have you get having a hard talk present, asking for money for your management, whatever. We can do this. Now there's another interesting aspect happening as a human being, we cannot really focus on many, many different things. Maybe tools before, you know, like with driving, we can watch the people, we can shave, we can press gas, but we can not really do a lot. You know, maybe we can talk on the phones and of course, movies where we can smoke, shave and all the all the all the fun part. But in reality there is again, it's not multitasking. No, it's just a focus point. So if you presenting and part of your focus point, you're thinking how stressed I am, how afraid I am, it taking away from speaking more clearly, slowing down, doing better pronunciation, make sure you sound good. Make sure you remember what you need to talk about it watching the cues of other people because all this need to be done when you're talking to people and representing the people and what you're saying about fear really got me thinking. I loved it. The not knowing the outcome is what segregates fear from excitement. I think that was a really nice way of putting. But is that your own hypothesis or is that something which is, is that, is that just something? No, this is not this is this is particularly not mine. No, this is something I took, I took from somebody else. Yeah, I think it's really good. I think it's a it's a huge take away and it really got me thinking when you're the box breathing and I think you know that and also, you know, calming down and being more present and just watching get in those queues and people around you all really important. But just began to think that then is it the case for some people? And maybe I've done this at times. Is it when you're fearful people just try and convince themselves of the outcome from the thing. So you think of all people and advice, which is about going to visualize the end state. You know, you have the confidence it's all going to be OK. You've done this before and actually that as perhaps that kind of visualizations and the idea of kind of convincing yourself it's going to be OK is another way that then helps people relax. Now, obviously, obviously, yeah, as long as you put the work in, then that'll work out. If you haven't put the work in, then you'll probably turn up and just make a right message. Yeah, there's a big visualization. You know, there's many, many ideas, Joe Dispenser and many, many other people that are talking about visualization in the end state, as you say. But as you mentioned, it's not just it's going to be OK, you need to visualize and put as many details as you can to this visualization. You know, this is a different particle, different show, but there's many, many, if you guys don't know about the idea, there's many movies, many books on the idea of visualization in the end state. I think it's great, but I think it's also help us plan if you think about if you're doing a project, if you're a project manager or programmer and you can visualize the end state and then you can go back and create all the steps. It's been much easier to to actually get in the steps as well. I think there was a coaching practice I did once actually, and I got people to do a visualisation. That went down very well. But I think then people should consider that if and perhaps this won't work in a sales environment. I don't know, maybe it will, but it would definitely work like a retrospective type environment just to get people to try box briefing before you begin. You know, a decent a certain intersection just to help people land and really be be present. I think because if we're not present, then I suppose the application of all the soft skills is diminished or harder to achieve. Well, let's think about that. If you take a car and it's amazing car and it's amazing driver with good tires, with good engine, but you don't do maintenance to the car, you don't change the oil on time, you don't check the brakes field and many other different things, what can happen, eventually you'll have problems. So same as a human being, you're an amazing presenter. You know how to use your voice, you know how to ask questions correctly, you're watching the queues, you understand the people, you know how to interact, you know how to do active listening. You really have empathy because you know the room. OK, you have a problem. Let me listen to you. Let not interrupt. Let me ask you some navigating questions to help you open up even more. There's a lot of parts going to soft skills. We didn't even mention what are the soft skills are matching of right now. All this come in to the big hassle of soft skills. Curiosity as well. Vulnerability. We'll mention this in a second, but basically related to fear, but you don't sleep well. You wake up every morning with a headache, you don't eat well. You're having 1616 meetings a day and no, sometimes you have good meetings, but sometimes you have a bad meetings. So if you meeting #5 was complete trash, how do you come back to meeting number six all like hello, how are you doing? Let's stop today. Like no, you're going to be devastated. What we we talk right now in the industry about the idea of born out. It's not an ideal be happy this and what I'm taking this is the same as with doing maintenance to a car. You have to do maintenance to you and this involve some kind of exercise. I read about an idea that I really like and you actually have in a book as well called exercise bites. When you just between meetings you have two minutes and you're going doing push ups or sit ups like literally like for a minute or two. I guess majority of the people not able to do the minutes of push ups as well in the same time. But there's many small tiny things you can do even jump for like 22nd to do this between have better food, have some water near you know to drink some water. Yeah, I'm just, I'm just looking because I've got water, but also what I have got is a skipping rope. And what I try and do and I will do after this is actually just pop out and skip for a couple of minutes because I never, I never got very good at skipping as a young person and I found it later in life. It's actually quite enjoyable. So yeah, I, I like to go and have a skip in between calls because, you know, it just gets to blood pumping a little bit and it's focused as well because I'm not very good at skipping, you know, I have to really concentrate otherwise it all goes wrong. I mean, you cannot skip in the meeting. I could skip in the meeting, yes. But as we spoke about before we started recording, you know, I'm, I'm also a wired headphone type person. And so if I had Bluetooth headphones on, maybe I could skip and do the meeting. But but with the wire, it's hard. Yep. So the idea of being present is stock sometime. Think and see how we can care ourself that we can actually be more productive quality versus quantity in some cases. So you mentioned soft, like what are soft skills there? I think it's worthwhile kind of going into some detail on it because I think it's a term that's bounded around a lot. And there's a great quote called accelerating performance where they say, you know, the soft stuff drives the hard stuff. And I'm a firm believer that there is a a strong link between performance and the correct application or a good application of soft skills, as long as you're a, you know, a domain which has a clear purpose and can really articulate what performance is. All back to one side, though, you've got in your experience and you know, from writing the book, how many exactly do you define soft skills? If you had like a yeah, if you had a short 32nd pitch to do to someone, how would you explain it? An art skills in the skills that basically are mathematics, chemistry, so programming something that we know the output in what's the case because we do expect 1 + 1 will be two and many other examples where whatever we do and we repeat the same idea we'll get similar results so it's. Languages, programming languages, it could be skill. You know many different things that are well well defined. Soft skills are as not always soft and fluffy, sometimes hard are the skills that relating to communication human being and we not always know the result and the result may change. Stupid example, I do when I present is I'll go to ChatGPT and ask how you doing, how you doing, how you doing, how you doing? It's a reply. I'm doing well, how are you? I'm doing well, how are you? I'm doing well, how are you? If I ask Ben, how are you doing, how are you doing, how are you doing #550 you want to punch me in the face of getting what's wrong with you? Because in many cases, the human communication is built on top of what we just thought. There's a connections. If I ask you where you live, this is for example, I hated Google because I asked Google where where I am is in Toronto. When I ask what's the weather, it will stay the weather in Toronto. But if I ask Google what is where is Miami, it's like Miami is there. Like for example, what's the weather? He will still tell me about the weather in Toronto, not in the weather in Miami because it's not going to make the connection between the 1st and the second one. In human beings, we in many cases building on top of the connections. 20 minutes ago we spoke about what I have in my head and how do I outcome this. So when we talk and I make connections on the topic we just discussed, we can build on top of these connections. So this is all examples of soft skills. Empathy is a very big one. How do I actually listen? Understand and being cohesive and potentially connecting to whatever you're telling. To me, this could be good and bad. I think in many pieces empathy is like, oh, something happened to you, let me listen to you, let me help you. But empathy could be something good. If you're happy, can I join? Be empathetic and actually celebrate with you your success. Even so, I'm maybe not so happy today. We don't really have this like, Oh my God, you just won the price. You just got a new car. I don't have a new car, but I'm a good friend. I want to spend this time with you to celebrate something that happened to you. Active listening. This is just worse right now. And I'm saying as well, I cut people. People always cut each other. And in many cases, it's just people have this idea they had and they want to speak versus let other people speak. One of the expressions I hear a lot about executive and managers, good leadership and good managers, is their speak last. They'll let everybody speak and then they make a decision. They're not trying to just force their ideas. They want to listen to others. More people saying what's need to be done. There's many, many examples of soft skills. The one just mentioned. I think one of the important one is curiosity. If you're not curious enough to change, to adapt, to learn, that's going to be hard. I was working on the quiz for soft skills and I sent this quiz to my friend that he's a developer. He's like, what is this? He's like, it's a quiz about soft skills. I'm good as I am, thank you. I'm like, what is the curiosity is not the one. I know what you mentioned those things and this is what you get taught a lot when you go and learn about coaching. You know, it's active listening, It's curiosity. And I think that that curiosity, it sounds so I don't know, dare I say almost like predictable, but I think it's but I think that it's hardly sounds predictable because people don't really understand what it is to have like curiosity as that the core of your mindset towards situations, because it breeds very different types of interactions. People will say to me, well, how you know, what should I be the podcast host? Why do you do it? How do you know what questions to ask? You know, I don't, I'm just really curious. Like a lot of the time I'm happy just to sit here and listen, right and learn some things and maybe add a little thing here. But I'm genuinely curious about most things that people say, and that's come from my coach training. And I think it's a real valuable tool, which I think is underrated. And I think people hear it and it bounces off their ears a little bit. But I think people should pay more attention. And maybe if you listen to this challenge yourself and say, well, when? How often are you actually curious as your first reaction to something? Yeah. How often is curiosity and your initial reaction rather than something you think of afterwards? So you mentioned something very interesting, I mean general curious. So you're visiting the city, you learn something new about this place. You heard about new sport that you never heard about it. You may never going to go and do this particular sport, but like, OK, I have no idea what it is. Let me read about this right now and what's happening. This is a very interesting part and I really love this. This, this, this part is you picking up a lot of different information while they're potentially not your hobbies and maybe they will become your hobbies. And in one day you talking to someone, gentleman woman, business, not business. And they mention a sport, they mention a hobby, they mention a place. And you're like, yeah, I've been there. Oh, oh, is this this sport? When they do blah, blah, blah, he's like, yes, how do you know what just happened? You basically found a hook. What they've been thinking about that to this person, because now they want to open up and tell you more about this particular subject. You know, these two things may happen. You can say, Oh my God, I love the subject. I've been doing what water canoeing for the last 15 years. Let's talk about the geeky, all the stuff we're like, know what? I heard about this sport a bit and it's very interesting, but I don't really know a lot. Would you mind telling me more? They will tell more. Trust me, they will. And we call this hoax. Dale Carnegie explained a lot about this idea in his in his book about how to find friends and influence people. And there's an entire methodology, if you can say this about how it's happened. In many cases it happened completely native when we talking to people. I had this opportunity to do a conference about skiing, snowboard and cybersecurity. Why I wanted to connect my personal life and my business life. And the idea was that if we coined to a conference, you don't really know how to speak with someone, how to start a conversation. So what do you do? But if you go to a conference with the connect cyber and skiing, then we remove this part of what to talk about because if you're going with somebody on the left, you can ask them, hey, I like your pair of skis. How do you like them? What is your favorite mountain? So you have this conversation started building already, and it's definitely helping to break the ice. This can be used in so many different places. So what would be a recommendation to people who listen to this? And I think it's all really great advice. And in scribbling down some notes, they feel like they've got some nice things they can go away and try. But then what you mentioned there, not everyone's going to go and start a conference and like marry together a hobby and a topic. So let's say you're going into a meeting, for example, you've got a, if it's a sales meeting, it could be like a split review. It could be to pitch a new product idea. It could be going to see a customer to get some feedback, whatever it might be like, how can you begin to bridge that gap between the the topic and couple of things? First, if you're working as a team, spend some time to learn your friends. What do they do? What do they do outside, not just at work? Through a variety of ways you can do it. It's going to help you to connect with them better and you're able to find topics to talk about them. And when you have a better personal connection, I hope you're going to be able to have a better work connection as well. The other part, you can also do research. You can go on LinkedIn, you can go on Facebook. Don't be a creep. No, don't just say hi. Hello, I know what you did in Miami last year on the ball. This was cool, but generally do a bit of research of other people. Learn to understand what you connect. We have time to design background. You have a lot of books on your background. It means that you like to read if you like to explore. This is also by the way, reverse hooks because if I see something in your background that make me to ask you a question that I basically created a reverse hook to let you connect to me versus me connect to you. This could be a T-shirt. This could be a guitar behind me. Not in my case. I don't play guitar. I sometimes joined with a green screen. I just move location. So I need to figure out how I put my green screen behind me and people like, hey, what time is the green screen like literally in the first minute. And this give me the ability to talk about the media, what can do because there is many ways to find it and understand how it's done. And I'm not saying, oh, this is manipulation. No, this is a basic research. When we use to date, we will do research or we'll try to find out about the other person, what they like, what they do, Maybe ask their friends what kind of restaurants, what kind of movies, places. So it seems all native. Yeah. I read a book even a years ago that said that everything's manipulation. You know, anytime you're doing something. Well, no, like we're just, I don't know, which has just not come to you about any kind of external pressure or any ideas or anything. It's all manipulation, like getting paid to do your jobs, manipulation, social norms around having to leave the house fully clothed and manipulation. And I thought it was really interesting that everything's a manipulation. And I don't think there's any. I think it's got a bad rap. I think manipulation, you know, I put the books in the background so that people look at them and say, oh, OK. And then then they ask me. I kind of I, I, I, I tease that out a little bit. I also like to include the books I really of the authors I really like so that if they haven't ever come on the podcast, I can say, oh, by the way, do you want to go on my podcast? I've always got your books in the background and they can't help but want to come along. The manipulation or not, you know it works and it helps us build that connection. It helps us put across our ideas nicely and clearly. And helps us kind of communicate well once we've kind of got that relationship. And you're going back to what you're saying about fear, I suppose if you're feeling connected, then hopefully fear levels will drop. And if you can connect people to each other and to the topic, then hopefully their minds are going to be in a more receptive state to listen to what you have to say. What has been the biggest challenge for you personally on this journey? Second time immigrant and I always spoke very fast in the end of the sentences and I have an accent in English as well. And this is probably one of my biggest challenges is to learn to speak slowly, clearly, removing many many fewer words, making pauses. So instead of saying, I'll just be quiet for a second or two. And it's actually helps when you relax and you're excited and not scared because if you're scared, you intend to have more fear words because you're under pressure. Learn to accept myself as I am. And I'm talking to this right now about my speech, not as a human in the entire you've gaining, but my accent, my voice. I have a low voice. I know. I stopped trying to remove my accent. I think it's totally fine right now. Now people want to listen to me as I understand my voice because it is, you know, there's an accent, there is low voice. So people remember this. And this was definitely one of the biggest challenges in communication in general is to learn what to visit. And honestly, I move from being very very shy, using my voice to be afraid to speak and introduce myself in a group of people. I'll sit down and repeat what I want to say for like 20 minutes before my torn will come in, in case we're a group of people. To be able to speak at conferences, to be able to moderate panels physically and virtually. To created quite many episodes online, probably more than two 300 from different variety of media. And I realize that my mind is very fast, but I can allocate a percentage of my mind to slow down and to remove failure words. But if I do panel moderation for example, there is a lot of stuff happening. You need to pay attention to the people that are talking. If you don't virtually need to pay attention to the chat, many, many things that you need to switch your focus can still keep focus on the conversation. It's actually worked well. So understanding myself from the voice perspective is definitely one of my biggest challenges. But I get this desire and this kind of drive to do it from old age when I realized I have this problem. And then when I was presenting one time and I was come completely messed up everything, I was sweating, I didn't know what to say. People were laughing. So it was very hard for me. And I was thinking about that when I used to present, I will get this, no sweaty hands, which is completely disgusting for myself or I will go all red because I was, I didn't know you can become like rad and basically have prosperation like in a minute or second because you just got scared and you're like, but you'll see many people when they start to present the 1st 2 minutes, they're very jiggly, they're very panicking. And then they're like, oh, nobody shooting at us. Oh, it's actually people listening and they just relax. So you're going to the state. So it takes time. It took me time to not even go to the state. I'm just starting in the state that I'm here for you people. Doesn't matter what happened. I'll do the best I can to deliver the information in the best way I can. I got to this point right now when my friends like, dude, what's up with the podcast voice? Can you just talk to normally? You know, like don't slow down. I had that dinner a couple of weeks ago. I was with, yeah, are you are tourists. If you listen to this, I, I will do this next time we meet because I didn't do it. He said someone, one of my clients said, can you do your podcast voice? I, I didn't actually do the podcast voice, but there's definitely a change to my speech pattern that I employ for the podcast because I too have a have a fast mind and it can be a challenge to get things out in a coherent fashion. Sometimes I say, yeah, you've got to love a podcast voice. Our time together is rapidly coming to a close. The the minutes have just flown by. Is this time to cry and say, can we do it again? Yeah, No, but cry all you like is fine. I, I, I, I cry at least when I cry every day. I was just trying to figure what would be. There's one kind of backup question I always have, which I like to ask and but not all the time. They're not overdo it, but I think because, yeah, you've written your book on on sales and and soft skills, you have to show the book. We didn't show the book yet. Architecting success, the art of soft skills and technical sales. Connect to sell more. That's for limited edition. Because a limited edition, yes. I only have 100 of them printed. It's a side note. Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, so everyone, everyone go where can people buy the book? Not a limited edition, not a limited edition, the Amazon. Thanks God. Right now my name is where is spelled differently and and hard. So if you go to Amazon and type Afghani Karam, EVGENIY Karam KHAREM, you'll find me over there and LinkedIn as well. By the way, go on LinkedIn, put my name there, and you will find me in the book. And go to softskillstack.com or softskillstack.ca is the same website. It's all about the books. There's blogs, there's podcast there, and there's information about the book as well. Amazing, amazing. And what's interesting, if you see in the book, you see the building blocks on the bottom. Yeah. So if you think what we spoke today, we spoke about different, different things, but the old building block of one connected puzzle, I like that. I like that. It's almost like you planned it that way. So here's here's a question for you. Last question. And it's it's a bit of a weird question, so don't feel obliged to answer this, But you've done a lot of podcasts, right? And you've been asked a lot of questions. Is there has there ever been a question that you wish someone had asked you in a podcast, but they never do wish It's a good one. I'm thinking about the questions that take the part that I missing in podcasts is in the end, and I tried it several times that I ask the host like we spend half an hour, 40 minutes together. Can you summarise in a minute? What did you learn today was new for you? Would you like me to try? Yes, please, yes. How long? More minute? Yes. Let me set up a timer. Hold on. I'm very I'm very precise about these types of things. If it's if it's a minute, I want to make sure if I dice, I spend a minute. OK, so in the last 42 minutes what have I learned? I have learnt that fear is not knowing the outcome and that's what differentiates it to excitement. And that perhaps if we can convince ourselves of a positive outcome, that can help us to relax. That it's OK to try breathing techniques and take that time out in whatever location it may be, toilet or otherwise, to try things like box breathing and that box breathing is actually something you should do for a couple of minutes. It's not something you just try and do 3 or 4 times because as you said, I think the normal person you said breathes, you know, double digits in a minute. And when slowing that down to what three times in 60 seconds, which is a significant reduction we spoke about, then yes, why fear is important, what you can do about it also about kind of being present and impacts inability to supply soft skills, about soft skills not being that soft. And the one thing maybe we didn't cover particularly with soft skills and cybersecurity, but there you go. That's my brief overview that was more weighted towards the beginning of the conversation. Yeah. So back to your question, I don't have anything in mind that people didn't ask me. I it's always weird people ask. Tell me about your history. Because when you mean a lot on the podcast, it's like, oh, yes, there we go. But you can always trick it, you know, you can always do it differently. But in a way, it's also interesting because sometimes you remember stuff that you forgot, that you didn't think about it. So if everybody started talking about your history and you don't have a script in your head and you just let it run, be natural if you may uncover something new that you forgot about it. And I think that's very nice. I wonder what is it about those moments when you're trying to talk about your history, history, talking about your own personal journeys. Can't. It's just reminiscing, isn't it? And sometimes when you reminisce, it depends who you're reminiscing with. That's the things that then pop into your mind. All the location. Actually. You know, whenever I go to my hometown, there's nothing more I enjoy than walking around my old hometown and reminiscing and seeing what's always come back. It's all anchoring. If you think about this like we, we have an anchor for place, smell, touch, people even even anchor to bad presentation, a good presentation. Like we talk about presentation. So if you go to presentation and you remember the good one, you did the fun one that even people applaud in the end, it's like, oh, you're going to automatically put you in the good mood in a good state because you're going to remember this good stuff. I was going to make a really bad joke about anchoring and how it always reminds me of sailing, but that'll be a stupid thing to say. I like sailing. Yeah, Kelly, thank you so much for coming along. It's been wonderful to have a share your insights and your tips, your knowledge and your experience with our listeners. As you've said, people can and should contact you on LinkedIn and buy a copy of your book, albeit not the limited edition. I I think everyone should go ahead and do that. Yeah, Kelly, thank you so much for coming on. I will include links to LinkedIn, your LinkedIn and to your book in the show notes. So if people are wondering, they're just go into your podcasting platform and Scroll down a little bit and then you will see on there, there'll be some links and make it nice and easy for you to contact Afghani or just buy his book. So again, again, thank you very much for coming on and everyone, thank you very much for listening. Before we end and I can edit this out, if you haven't got an answer to this, you have. Afghani, is there anything that you would like to share? Just as a closing thought, one idea is don't forget, don't forget, don't be free to step out of your comfort zone. It's very interesting. It is scary, but we know we can translate scary to excitement right now. But when you're pushing yourself out of the comfort zone, you're going to discover many different things. And I'm not saying it has to be sport. I'm not saying it has to be presentation, but it could be something that you didn't try and didn't before. And the easiest things to understand what it is is think about few things that you afraid or you don't like to do. Maybe they're the one when you can deep a finger and try to do it. Yeah. Make a list and do 1A day you have. Gary. Thank you very much. This has been the Product Agency podcast. We'll be back again next week.