Today, sports fans and high achievers, you’re in for a treat! Empathy is not soft. It’s not weak. Nothing thrills me more than when I can share examples of empathetic leadership that help win national championships or create winning sports dynasties. You may recall my example of Golden State Warriors coach, Steve Kerr, in my book, The Empathy Dilemma.
Emmy award-winning producer and sports broadcaster Jen Mueller shares how she’s seen coaching and leadership styles evolve in the last few decades, how she conducts sideline interviews with athletes who may have either had the worst or best day of their careers, why empathy is not just showing up on a bad day, but encouraging and celebrating your team’s best days, and why top athletes and performers crave clarity and feedback in order to get better. You’ll get so many tips on how to deliver feedback, ask the right questions, and infuse joy and levity into your team for championship-level performance.
To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
- We don’t need or want to be cruel in the name of candor. Candor and clarity are empathetic and can help everyone understand where they are at.
- Prepare ahead so that you can be with your team in the moment. Consider: how do you give somebody permission to talk about their win and an easy way to share in that celebration with everybody else?
- You can lead a high-performance team, while still leaving room for emotion, feelings, and disappointment when things don’t go well.
“We assume that everybody understands what winning and losing look like and they don’t. When you are clear, now people can do their job to the highest level.” — Jen Mueller
References Mentioned:
Welcome to Wrexham: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0D77Y5BMG
From Our Partner:
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Go to sparkeffect.com/edge now and download your complimentary Professional and Organizational Alignment Review today.
Jen Mueller: Producer, Broadcaster, Founder, Talk Sporty to Me
Jen Mueller is an Emmy award-winning producer and sports broadcaster based in Seattle. A 24-year sports broadcasting veteran, she currently serves as the Seattle Seahawks radio sideline reporter and is a member of the Seattle Mariners television broadcast team on ROOT SPORTS. She was honored for her work in the industry in 2022 as the recipient of the Keith Jackson Media Excellence Award presented by the Seattle Sports Commission.
In addition to her work on the sidelines, Jen is an established business communication expert and the founder of Talk Sporty to Me. She’s published three books that outline her approach to conversations and effective communication. She is also the executive producer, host and creator of “I Cook, You Measure” a cooking show on YouTube.
Connect with Jen:
Talk Sporty to Me: TalkSportytoMe.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jenmuellertalksporty
Instagram: instagram.com/talksportytome
Threads: threads.net/@talksportytome
Connect with Maria:
Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.com
Learn more about Maria and her work: Red-Slice.com
Hire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross
Take my LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with Empathy
LinkedIn: Maria Ross
Instagram: @redslicemaria
X: @redslice
Facebook: Red Slice
Threads: @redslicemaria
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome to the empathy edge podcast, the show that proves why cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host, Maria Ross, I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator and empathy advocate. And here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy, from trends and research to the future of work to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society. It’s great for business. Today, sports fans and high achievers, you’re in for a treat. Empathy is not soft. It’s not weak. And nothing thrills me more than when I can share examples of empathetic leadership that helps win national championships or create winning sports dynasties. You may recall my example of Golden State Warriors Coach Steve Kerr in my book The Empathy dilemma today, Jen Mueller shares how she has seen empathy show up in high performing sports teams. Jen is an Emmy Award winning producer and sports broadcaster based in Seattle, a 24 year sports broadcasting veteran. She currently serves as the Seattle Seahawks radio sideline reporter and is a member of the Seattle Mariners television broadcast team on root sports. She was honored for her work in the industry in 2022 as the recipient of the Keith Jackson media Excellence Award presented by the Seattle Sports Commission. In addition to her work on the sidelines, Jen is an established business communication expert and the founder of talk sporty. To me, she’s published three books that outline her approach to conversations and effective communication. She’s also the executive producer, host and creator of I cook you measure a cooking show on YouTube today, we talk about how she’s seen coaching and leadership styles evolve in the last few decades, how she conducts sideline interviews with athletes that may have either had the worst or best day of their careers. Why empathy is not just showing up on a bad day, but encouraging and celebrating your team’s best days. And why top athletes and performers crave clarity and feedback in order to get better, you’ll get so many tips on how to deliver feedback, ask the right questions and infuse joy and levity into your team for championship level performance. This is a great one. Take a listen. Welcome Jen Mueller to the empathy edge podcast. I have been so looking forward to this conversation with
Jen Mueller 02:50
you. It has been on my books for a while. I cannot wait to dive in.
Maria Ross 02:55
I know and your work is so interesting. We just heard your bio. You know, all the impressive accomplishments that you’ve had, sort of the voice of the Seahawks in many respects, and sideline reporter, and also the work that you do with talk sporty to me and helping people communicate more effectively and leverage sports as a way to find commonality and find common ground, which is a huge theme with empathy. But I want to know this is always the first question I start with is, what’s your story? Briefly, how did you even get into this work? How did you get into the work of sports, casting, producing, and then ultimately doing the work you do with helping teams communicate better?
Jen Mueller 03:32
I have to give a lot of credit to my high school guidance counselor, Sandra Steele. Mrs. Steele, saw something in me that I did not well. I guess technically, everybody saw that I could talk a lot and that I wasn’t afraid to talk in front of people. And I thought it was going to be a teacher. I had grown up wanting to be a third grade teacher, and that seemed like a pretty safe and straightforward path. And Mrs. Hill said, Have you ever considered broadcasting? And I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard, because who knew a broadcaster like, how do you even get started on that? Yeah, as it turns out, you go to school for that, and you get internships, and then you get a job, just like everything else, you’re working your way up, and you’re gaining skills as you go. The one thing that I tell people when they ask me for career advice when it comes to my story is, if you would have asked me what my dream job was, or what I would be doing at this point in my career, so I’m 25 years into my career, my dream job was anything working in sports. I didn’t care what city it was in. I don’t care what sports teams I was covering. All I wanted was a chance to work in sports. When I started down this path, they were allowing women, but not necessarily encouraging and supporting women. So my vision and my goal was way too small and way too narrow. I have spent the last 18 years on the mariners. Television, broadcast. I’m 16 seasons with the Seahawks. It has been really cool to see the conversations, the people that I’ve gotten to meet, the experiences that I’ve had. And I would say this, it is always about finding the opportunity in the conversation, and I think that’s where it all ties in, because for me, if I wouldn’t have advocated for myself in the smallest ways possible, I wouldn’t be here. And I’m very passionate about making sure that my clients in the corporate sector have those same tools so that they can do that
Maria Ross 05:34
as well. Yeah, I love that idea of presence and being able to adapt in the moment, because if you look at the data and the research, and you can choose a field like sales, what makes sales people successful is not knowing the product inside out and not memorizing the pitch. It’s actually empathy combined with ambition, and that’s because they’re able to adapt in the moment when they’re talking to somebody, to be able to read the room, and it sounds like you’ve employed a lot of those skills too. When you’re interviewing someone, you don’t know what they’re going to say, so you have to be in a place where it’s like, well, you can’t say no. They’re not following the script. They’re not saying what I want them to say, right? So how do you create that common ground when you’re when you’re interviewing athletes and they’re just coming off the field, right? Well,
Jen Mueller 06:19
there’s a lot going on when they are just coming off the field. I think the thing that people miss most often, and that sales example, is a great one, right? We go into conversations, and we think that being present means everything has to happen organically in the moment. You can’t have a script, you can’t have these things formulated ahead of time, and we set ourselves up to fail all the time, right? So when athletes come off the field, I am having a conversation about their day at work. So to compare this to business, what we’re doing is having a performance review in the moment, in front of everybody on TV in the stadium, and in some cases, it is a post mortem on what went wrong, right? So empathy starts with understanding, right, the tone and the context and all of those things. But I have also written out my questions ahead of time, and you’re right. I don’t know exactly what they are going to say, but empathy allows me to put myself in their shoes and guess their response to the degree that I need to meet my objective, right? Because these interviews are about three questions long. They generally do not go more than 90 seconds, so I am on a tight, tight timeline to get the answers they need that resonate with the audience. And ultimately, if you ask me, what I do for a living, I give people a platform to tell their stories. I want to make sure that, however I phrase that question, I give you a platform to tell me the story of the play, the game, the hard work that you put in what this means to your family. All of that has to be thought through ahead of time, so that in that moment, you can be present and not thinking of the next question and not thinking of the next answer, and not going, Oh my gosh. But I forgot to ask about this, and I forgot, oh, once you were prepared. Now you can be present. Now you can hear, and that conversation, it feels like a conversation instead of an interview, for
Maria Ross 08:26
sure, and I think that’s great advice for anyone delivering a performance review. In general, it’s, you know, the points you need to discuss, you know, it’s their performance, and you know, the hardest ones are when it’s difficult, but it’s giving them space to tell their story and getting curious about what actually happened for you out there. How do you think the game went? Right? Yeah,
Jen Mueller 08:45
that’s exactly right. Yeah, you just kind of open it up. How would you rate your performance today? And they’ll tell you, I think don’t give people in business enough credit. And I know why this happens, and part of it is, I work in a very highly accountable environment, right? High performance athletes know when they have messed up. They know when they didn’t meet expectations. They know when they weren’t prepared, and they fully expect to be called out on it. Now I might not be the one calling you out, but a manager or coach is going to call you out. Your teammates going to call you out, the front office is going to call you out. And so I think the difficult conversations have a very different tone in sports, because everybody just watched it all play out. And so the harder conversations is when you realize how much it means to these guys, like the mistake is a mistake, right? Not having the same talent level as another team, you can’t fix that. What’s hard is a seven game losing streak and you just feel it like you feel their pain and you feel their frustration. That’s hard, right? That’s hard when a guy’s on the verge of tears because he knows that his play just resulted. In an outcome that hurt everybody else, right? Like those are the harder conversations to me than what we think of in business,
Maria Ross 10:07
exactly. And you as you know, I’ve looked to sports for some analogies around leading with empathy, and I know in my most recent book the empathy dilemma, you really liked my story about Steve Kerr and I just so admire him, the coach of the Golden State Warriors, and his entire value system and ethos around coaching with empathy. And you know, great example of someone who learned it from someone who modeled it, but also how it’s not just about punitive and writing people and pressuring. It’s about trying to get to know each individual player and what their strengths and their challenges are, and helping them create not just a group of people on a court, but actually creating a team to your point. Each person has very clear expectations of what their role is, and when they don’t deliver, they understand that is something that needs to be improved, versus sometimes in the workplace, we have people who think they’re doing a great job because we don’t know what mission they’re signing up for, because the leader hasn’t been clear about what, and not just we’re getting our individual jobs done, but what on this team? How do we operate and what do we expect from each other, and that’s how you can balance empathy and accountability. So I would love to hear from you. You know you’ve been around sports a long time. Have you seen a shift in the coaching style, or has it been that you’ve always seen this secret, quote, unquote, to success, and many other coaches didn’t realize it until now. We’re talking about it like, what’s been your perspective on on leadership and how it’s evolved in sports,
Jen Mueller 11:45
I think it absolutely has undergone a shift in the last 15 or so years. Every coach that I had growing up, granted, I only played through high school, but every coach I had growing up, and every coach that I observed when I was in college and, you know, just getting into the industry, it was old school, right? And it was exactly what you were describing. There’s no smiling, there’s a laughing, you know, yeah, you were having fun because you got to play sports. But I wouldn’t say that practices were fun, right? There was a lot of yelling, a lot of screaming, the accountability. It was always about, like, toughening you up. But I would say, like old school, it was like you got to be tougher than the next person out there. And what changed for me was Pete Carroll, who I think is very comparable. He and Steve Kerr are very good friends. Pete Carroll was the head coach of the Seahawks for 14 years. He was previously at USC one national championships. And I will tell you, Maria. And it is so funny to me to think about this. I remember exactly where I was when I found out that Pete Carroll was being hired to see I was in the frozen food section of Costco, and the alert comes through on my phone, and I’m like, this is never gonna work like, I don’t think that this college approach is ever gonna work in the NFL, and I don’t know if I’m gonna like working in this environment anymore. It is so ridiculous to think about, because Pete completely changed everything, and it was fun, and he proved that you could, in fact, have fun and be successful and be a high performer, and he did all of those things that you were talking about with Steve Kerr, and when Steve Kerr and Pete Carroll have that kind of success, now, what gives other coaches permission? Because nobody wants to go out there and fail, right while being empathetic and try to, I think all of those things happened behind the scenes prior to some of these big coaches. So you would have, like, position coaches, and they would be the ones who would come and put their arm around guys or gals, right, and coach them up and love them up. But that kind of happened behind the scenes. What you were seeing now is coaches who weren’t afraid to tell guys that they love them. We’re seeing coaches intentionally maximize the skill set, even if it’s non traditional and that doesn’t fit, you know, the mold of this position, or, you know, this type of offense or defense. I think it’s also giving people business a different way to think about things 100%
Maria Ross 14:13
I think the more that we have those models, and that was my whole desire when I wrote the empathy edge was we’ve gotta normalize this. We’ve gotta show people that there are examples of leaders and teams who are winning with empathy. Because if we don’t see it, we can’t be it. I mean, representation matters, and the fact that you have people, this is what I love about this. This sports is an industry. Professional sports is an industry where it’s pretty binary, you win or you lose. Yes, right? And if they can accommodate and make room for empathetic leadership in order to succeed, then you know, some software company, some manufacturing firm, surely can find a way to leverage empathy to get the best out of their employees and to create an environment where people want. To be there. They want to be part of the team. And you know, I hate it when I hear coddling. It’s not coddling. If the goal is to get the best out of your people and to perform and hit your numbers and make your goals and get your bonuses, then do what you need to do to help people be their best at work and to not be afraid to innovate, not be afraid to improvise, not be afraid to fail, because that’s where you’re going to get change and transformation and innovation. Yes,
Jen Mueller 15:31
and you made some great points in the book about how empathy. I used to just define it as putting myself in their shoes, right? But all of the examples that you kind of pulled out and that you teased out, empathy is also clarity, and empathy is joy, and empathy is all of these other things tied together, and clarity is a really big one. So when you see that sports is binary, look, everybody knows what the objective is. The objective is. There’s four more points, right? Yeah, and we laugh at that, right? Because every sports and everybody knows the objective. We are not nearly as clear business now, me, as a business owner, I know what my objective is, but do the people who are helping me execute this, do they know what it is? We assume that everybody understands what winning, losing look like and they don’t. And when you are clear now, people can do their job to the highest level, right? That’s not coddling. And I tell you, every single athlete so there’s cut down day in the NFL, they used to say the Turk is coming for your playbook, right? It used to. And if you’ve ever watched hard knocks, right? They make it this big, dramatic thing, yeah. Guys care, obviously, whether they get cut or they don’t get cut, and they do. But more than anything, they want you to tell them the truth leading up to that, they want clarity on where they stand if they are the bottom two on the roster. It doesn’t hurt nearly as badly as finding out they thought they were up here, and they’re actually down here exactly. We’re finding out. All you wanted me to do was work on my hand placement, or my foot placement, or this is the drill that I wasn’t performing at and so you started to question my ability, but all I needed to do was that if you were just there with me from the beginning, I would have done that. Yeah, might not have been enough to make the team, but it’s, I guess it is the difficult conversation in business. But I really love how you brought that out being empathetic, because we do tend to avoid those conversations. Yeah, yeah. We anticipate somebody pushing back against having that player. That’s where
Maria Ross 17:38
we confuse empathy with being nice. That’s where we confuse empathy with it means I’m never going to upset you, right? And there’s a way to do it like there’s radical candor and there’s kind candor, right? We don’t want to be candid in the name of candor. We don’t want to be cruel, right? There’s a way to be direct and clear without being cruel to somebody and saying, Well, I’m just being honest, right? We hear that all the time. But that idea of it’s not just about and it’s not just about being with someone in a difficult performance review or in the hard situations or when things are quote, unquote bad. It’s also about being empathetic in the moments where they’re performing well and seeing things from their perspective, and seeing things when, when things are going right? And so we often, I think that’s where we conflate empathy and sympathy, right? Yes, is that you can be empathetic in the good times too, and share in the good times with people?
Jen Mueller 18:33
Yeah. And I would say the thing that always goes through my head when I’m doing a post game interview, so during Mariner season. If it is a huge win, I’m probably dodging a Gatorade bath right now. For some of these guys, they have experienced that moment of celebration any number of times, right? I mean, it doesn’t happen all the time, but it would happen enough that it is not a new experience for them, right? There have been very specific moments in my career where I know this is the only walk off interview this athlete will ever have, and having that awareness at the beginning of the interview my question, there’s always one question there that is specifically for his family, so that When you look at this 30 years from now, 40 years from now, you get to play this for your kids and your grandkids, and you got to have that moment of joy in front of everybody like that. Those are the sorts of things. Yeah, we do what we’re looked at right? Because we think, Oh, great. You already know that you did a great job, right? Everybody’s cheering for you. They’re celebrating you. Of course, you did a great job. You know that? Yeah, how do you give somebody permission to talk about it and an easy way to share in that celebration with everybody else?
Maria Ross 19:55
I love that. I just got goosebumps when you said that, because I think that it’s such a level. Of awareness that you’re bringing to it as an interviewer of just like, what frame of mind is this person in, also based on your experience, knowing that you’re going to make this a moment, whether they realize it’s a moment or not. You know what I mean, and that’s the forethought, that’s the preparation that goes into being empathetic, so that in the moment, you can be with that person where they are, and that’s what we mean by empathy. I always say, you know, empathy is not us crying on the floor with our employees. I mean, it might be, you know, you might be crying with your team. It doesn’t mean it’s always that, yeah.
Jen Mueller 20:31
And I think sometimes we have this cop out of, well, I don’t know how they’re gonna react. I know what they’re gonna say to that, hell am I supposed to know? Right? That’s their life. It’s not my life. And I would say this, I always know what the answer to the question is going to be in that I know that if I am the pitcher who just pitched a complete game, right, I’ve never thrown a pitch in a big game. I have never done that. What I have done is absolutely crushed an assignment. You know what that feeling is? It’s the same feeling, right? Like, yes, you can sit there and say, Well, I don’t know. Like, how am I supposed to know that they wanted to talk about this, how am I supposed to know? Well, you didn’t know, because fucking what’s comparable in your world, right? Right? You. And this is a question that drives me crazy. What were you thinking on that play? I hate that question, because now you can ask it kindly, hey, oh my God, what did you see and what were you thinking on that play? Or it can come across as a challenge,
Maria Ross 21:32
what were you thinking?
Jen Mueller 21:33
What were you think, right? In either case, which approach do you appreciate more? Do you want somebody to come up to you and say, Hey, what were you thinking and you sent that email when you pitched that idea. Or would you rather have somebody come to you and say, hey, that’s interesting. Where did you get that idea? Or, I haven’t heard it felt like that before. How did you reach that conclusion? Right? That’s a very different tone of conversation. And my guess is you would appreciate the lab rather than the form, right? You’re
Maria Ross 22:07
going to be less on the defensive if you get that kind of an approach. So I want to talk about this idea of we were just mentioning it about showing empathy isn’t just about showing up when people have a bad day. So there’s always a way to connect and put yourself in their shoes. You gave us some examples. What are some ways that you’ve seen coaches balance, you know, winning streaks or balance when the team’s doing well. I mean, they don’t just say, like, Good job. Go home. No need to practice anymore, right? So how do they have empathy for the fact that their team is enjoying the win, enjoying the success, and they still need to be accountable. They still need to put in the reps. They still probably have things to work on. Have you seen some examples of coaches, whether in your own sports life or on the sidelines, where you’ve seen them handle that really deftly?
Jen Mueller 23:00
I think part of a sports schedule takes care of this a little bit right, because your practice schedule just happens. However, coaches do make sure that players get a chance to enjoy time when they have it. So sometimes during the NFL season, I’ll have what they call a victory Monday, and it will cancel all practice in meetings on Monday, so you get a bonus surprise day off on long paid time off exactly, exactly. Now it doesn’t happen often, because there still is the responsibility of you got to take care of your body and all of that stuff, you know, on long flights. Hope they don’t necessarily go over film all the time. They will sit and watch a movie and they will have fun. Now, it’s only a couple hours, right? But that was kind of their time to decompress. I think the other thing is, when they have team meetings, yeah, you get the bad highlight meals like these are the plays that we need to fix, yeah, but they also show these are the plays that you did really well, and to keep doing it really well, here’s what we’re going to emphasize this week. So God, I think that there’s a lot of different ways that you can celebrate wins without just shutting down and saying, Okay, I’m going to go on vacation for a week or Nope, we don’t have to do that again. Also highly competitive and high performing people, they want that next thing. So part of coaching people to their potential is giving them that next thing. I
Maria Ross 24:36
love that because this speaks directly to the joy pillar in the empathy dilemma that this is you can have accountability, and you can actually increase accountability and increase performance by creating some levity, by creating some lightness for people so they’re not constantly using the stress part of their brain, right? We need a break from that. And I love these examples, because I could totally see how this kind of. Apply in a workplace environment where it’s like, you know, there might be a boss that says, you know, yeah, all that went really well, but let’s focus on what we need to work on first, like, let people celebrate a little bit. Let people let off some steam.
Jen Mueller 25:12
And, you know what? And I was just thinking about this, there are certain songs that I hear that take me back to very specific Mariner seasons, because every year there is a winning playlist, and one of our players takes responsibility that in a lost, that clubhouse is quiet like there is zero music. There is zero noise in a win, the same playlist plays after every single game. It’s lightness, it’s levity, but it’s also an easy way for everybody to acknowledge what just happened. You could have a winning playlist or winning song at work. You could have something that looks like that, you know, and it often types of football. You’ll have what we call sizzle reel, which is the highlights, right? They just cut them nice and fast, and sometimes they’ll throw in fun clips from the guys, but it’s just like a two minute thing of like, okay, it’s your hype video, right? You do that before you get into the work to remind you how good it felt to succeed. Okay, now we’re going to get back to work exactly
Maria Ross 26:17
that. My husband is a CMO at a software company, and he has a creative director who, on his own accord, just creates little sizzle reels and little videos of things that they’ve been doing, not because he’s asked to do it, just he likes to do it, and just the humor and the lightness and just the team building, it provides yes for people to be able to just laugh a little bit and enjoy it and Go, yeah, that off site or that meeting, was actually really fun. You know, it’s interesting, because this other great example that I saw of empathy in action was actually on the documentary, welcome to Wrexham. And I don’t know if you’ve been following that on Hulu. It’s Rob mcelheny and Ryan Reynolds, who bought the soccer the football team in Wales, and have turned it around, and it’s from the beginning, when they first buy the team, to how they learn how to staff up leadership and how they management. It is a master class and in Leadership and Motivation, like you should binge it because it’s amazing. But there was one episode in particular where they lost a key game that was going to get them to promotion. And the guys were devastated, of course, right? They’ve been working really hard. They thought all this investment they had, all the town behind them, all the Hollywood, you know, attention they were getting. And it was really interesting, because actually, Rob mcelheny and Ryan Reynolds are both really empathetic team owners. They empower the leaders that they’ve hired. They bring in the right people. They’ve invested in the women’s soccer team of Wrexham a lot, and that team has gone on to championships. But there was this one particular moment where they both went into the locker room separately, and when Rob mcelheny went to the locker room, he was just sort of like, you know, chin up, move on next game. Like, don’t, like, he wasn’t letting them feel the loss, right? And great intentions, right? I just don’t want these guys to feel horrible about themselves. Like, you know, suck it up. Let’s look forward to get back at it. We’ll go to the next game. Ryan Reynolds walked in and was like, this sucks, you guys. Like, I get it. I know how you’re feeling right now. This was not great. And yeah, I feel you, and let this sink in, like he was letting them have their feelings and have their moment, because he knew they were going to get back to it. He didn’t have to tell them that, right? And I just thought it was such a stark contrast in terms of what empathy looks like in disappointment, and it’s not making people brush it off. It’s not making people focus on what’s next. It’s letting them feel what they feel when they feel it, and then we know we’re going to get back to work. Yes. And I just, I was so, you know, I don’t like to bring my work into my, like, personal time a lot, but, you know, I was like, Oh my gosh, I have to remember that, talking about it. And it was such a great example of how you can lead a high performance team and leave room for feelings, and leave room for emotions, and leave room for someone to be disappointed in the moment, and it doesn’t mean they’re not going to try hard the next day or the next practice. Yeah, you
Jen Mueller 29:16
didn’t just lose the magic, right? You had that game, or it was, it was an off night, or whatever it is you did, let’s
Maria Ross 29:21
acknowledge it, yes, because, like you said, they want you to be clear that they don’t want somebody prettying it up for them,
Jen Mueller 29:28
right? Oh my gosh, that is something we get wrong all the time, and I have seen this happen with really well intentioned people, fans, right? Or people who work at a stadium and the guys will come off the field after what we all know was a terrible game for whatever reason, right? Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. It’s a terrible game. The last thing they want to hear is, great job. Good job. You’ll get them next time. Do not like just go talk to them, right? That’s not empathy. That’s not right. Support. They are mad. Had like they did not meet their expectations. So I think some of that is also just giving people agency right over how they’re going to feel in the moment. What are the easiest ways we can do that and acknowledge that? In business, it’s I do this with interviews too. So just because I have a microphone does not mean that you have to talk to me. Just because you are an athlete does not mean you were required to give me a post game interview. So I will always give them a choice on will you answer a few questions for me today? Now, most of the time, they will say yes, but there are times after games, or I don’t know that they just got chewed out by their position coach, right? Or I don’t know what’s going on in their life, they’ll say, I just I can’t today. Or, as happened a couple of times during the baseball season, they’ll tell me no. And then two minutes later, after they had chance to feel their feelings, they’re like, actually, I can answer three questions, right? It’s not pushing in that moment. It’s giving them a little bit of agency to choose. Okay, now I’m ready for this. Okay, got it. You’re not going to be in my face. Got it.
Maria Ross 31:06
I love this. And so kind of, as we wrap up, tell us a little bit about the work that you do with business people and with companies, and how you translate, you know, this world of sports that you’re in and the lessons that you’ve learned there into the workplace. You’ve talked a little bit about it today, but specifically, what kinds of things are you helping companies and professionals with? What are they coming to you
Jen Mueller 31:28
to get better on they really want to be better at communicating. And a lot of times we think about this in, you know, like, really just kind of overarching themes and terms, or you talk about being a better teammate. Well, being a good teammate and communicating at a high level has some really specific things that need to happen. So people come to me for very specific conversation strategies that I have developed and learned through trial and unfortunately error on live TV and radio with professional athletes. So there’s actually words to say, right? It’s not, we’re not talking about things in theory. I will give you the formula. I will give you the words to say that. And sometimes, a lot of times, it’s reminding people how many opportunities we have during the course of the day to make an impression, to build a relationship, to showcase your skills. We tend to think that it’s all happening around us and that, oh my gosh, you know, like I’ve either missed the opportunity or I don’t have enough working for me. Nope, I will point out all of those little interactions that you can use to your favor and give you that little confidence boost to keep you going. I
Maria Ross 32:35
love it. And you know, the reason you’re here is because I know empathy is such an important part of your work and an important part of your success. So thank you for sharing your insights with us today. It’s been so fun, and we’ll have all your links in the show notes. But where can people find out more about you and your work?
Jen Mueller 32:50
The best place is probably the website talks sporty to me.com. There’s lots of stuff there. There’s ways to get a hold of me. There’s also ways to connect on the socials. So love
Maria Ross 33:00
it well. Jen Mueller, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you Maria. And thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge podcast. If you like what you heard, you know what to do. Rate review, share with a friend and a colleague, and remember until next time cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind. For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy. Visit the empathy edge.com there you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources. Book me for a Keynote or workshop and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news and events, please follow me on Instagram at Red slice Maria, never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place. You.
