The language experts from maslansky + partners take on the smartest, savviest, and sometimes stupidest messages in the market today. CEO Michael Maslansky and President Lee Carter bring their experience with words, communication, and behavioral science to the table—along with a colleague or client—and offer up a “lay of the language.” Their insight helps make sense of business, life, and culture, and proves over and over again that It’s Not What You Say, It’s What They Hear™.

In this episode of HearSay, Partners Michael Maslansky, Lee Hartley Carter, and Katie Cronen navigate the complex terrain of “bad facts” in messaging—a topic that is as timely as it is uncomfortable. In a landscape fraught with political controversies like Biden’s age and corporate scandals such as skyrocketing pharmaceutical prices, denial is simply not an option. Instead, our hosts unpack a transformative approach to confronting these tricky realities through the framework of the four Rs: Reject, Rebut, Reframe, and Replace. Tune in to sharpen your communication strategy and understand the power of language in the face of adversity.

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TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Michael Maslansky:

They said, what? Welcome to HearSay, a podcast from the language strategist at Maslansky and Partners, where we give our take on the strategy behind the smartest, savviest, and stupidest messages in the market today and what you can learn from them. Our philosophy is it’s not what you say that matters. It’s what your audience hears. And that’s why we call this HearSay. I’m Michael Maslansky, CEO of Maslansky and Partners and author of The Language of Trust. 

Lee Hartley Carter:

And I’m Lee Carter, President, Partner of Maslansky and Partners as an author of a book called Persuasion. 

Michael Maslansky:

And today we have with us our partner, Katie Cronen, who specializes in crisis communications and reputation management, as well as many other things. But she’s helped many of our clients navigate through some of their toughest challenges with strategic language. So thanks Katie for being here. 

Katie Cronen:

Thanks for having me.

Michael Maslansky:

I will say it’s probably the last opportunity that we’re going to have with you to do a podcast for a little while for reasons that shall not be disclosed, but you’ll be –

Katie Cronen:

I will be back, but I’m glad we could fit this in. 

Michael Maslansky:

Today we want to talk about a particular use case for effective language. And we know that language can be a really powerful tool to shape how people think about issues, ultimately to shape how they act. But what happens when you are faced with a bad fact where something happens and you have to respond and we’re seeing it right now. We just saw it in really clear, clear, clear detail with Biden’s age. We saw it with Trump’s 34 convictions. We see it in the commercial marketplace where in pharma, we’ve got high prices. That is a reality that pharmaceutical companies need to address. We see it in all different areas. We’re seeing it a lot with companies who made climate commitments or launched DEI programs and are now thinking how to deal with what they’ve created in the face of pushback from different groups. And so in all these cases, there are things that are true, that are out there and they need to figure out how to respond. And so we’re gonna talk about the different ways that you can respond, because there are many ways to do it and what some of the pros and cons are with each of them. So how’s that sound? Ladies, is that a good idea? Should we do that? Should we stick with the plan? All right. 

Katie Cronen:

Yeah, let’s dive in 

Michael Maslansky: 

So, I think it’s important to first start with what we mean by a bad fact, right? And so sometimes as a former lawyer, I’m not allowed to practice law for anybody listening to this. there’s nothing associated with legal advice on here, just to be clear. But often in the law, when you’re in a case, you talk about a bad fact. But in the world that we’re operating in, I’ll give some examples of bad facts. kind of alluded to them. So a bad fact is evidence that Biden is too to serve. This is before he dropped out of the race. Or a bad fact is that former President Trump is a convicted felon. In many places that would be considered a bad fact. Or Pharma prices, as we said, or a changed set of commitments. You have one set of commitments on your homepage one day, you have a different set of commitments on your homepage the next day. There are many other examples that we’ll get into. But those are situations where kind of on their face, there would seem to be something that’s true, but bad, right? So how do people deal with it? Like what are some of the different options that we can talk about that companies may have to choose from when it comes to dealing with a situation like this that’s a bad fact. 

Michael Maslansky:

So we’ve seen many different ways that companies can address these. And I think we have perspectives that we’ll talk about that some of them are generally better than others, but why don’t we start by laying them out?   

Michael Maslansky: 

So the first one is the rejection, right? The answer to the bad fact is no. We’re gonna deny, deny, deny.  What do we mean by that?  

Lee Hartley Carter:

Yeah. So deny, deny, deny is one that I think is pretty popular and we’re seeing it a lot in the political sphere. We’ve seen it in the early stages of, of Joe Biden when he was, that people were bringing up some videos and saying, gosh, he doesn’t look like he’s in, in really good, good shape. And they were like, you know, those videos, those are cheap fakes. You’re not seeing it. That’s not right. Those are not true. He is in fact in great shape. I meet with him one-on-one and there was a lot of denial. there. Trump, I think it’s one of his favorite things to do is deny when he’s talking about the criminal activity, anything, he denies that he had any relationship with Stormy Daniels. He denies that any of these things are true.   

Michael Maslansky:

I did not have sexual relations with that woman… That was a different president. 

Lee Hartley Carter: 

That’s another really, that was a different president. But in politics, denying seems to be something that is done a lot. I also think we saw Joe Biden do it when it came to the economy, when people were talking about how high prices were or that he couldn’t get groceries on the shelves and he said, no, the shelves are stocked and the economy’s never been better. And so that’s another form of denial. 

Katie Cronen:

We see it from companies all the time too. These are short statements. When they’re rejecting it, they just say, there’s absolutely no truth to this. And they leave it at that. There’s usually not more explanation. If they’re smart, they don’t actually repeat the accusation. They literally just say, that’s ridiculous. And the intention there is, If your premise is one that I don’t agree with, hopefully I can just strongly refute it, strongly deny it, and enough time will pass. The news cycles will change and people will forget about it.  

Michael Maslansky:

So does it work? 

Katie Cronen:

I think if you look at both politics as well as what happens in company situations, I think it can work with your supporters. So if you have people who are already inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt, this is usually what they want to hear from you to just say, like, this is not even worth our time. Absolutely. This is untrue. But if it flies in the face of how your detractors see you I think that it’s always, it’s never going to be enough. The best it can do is actually buy you some time to flush out your stance. So in the case even for instance, of Trump repeatedly denying any kind of criminal activity, right? Like he always includes a rejection. He always includes a denial. I even think for his supporters, it doesn’t really matter because he has come to make this part of his persona, it’s what we expect from him. We would kind of be shocked if he responded to anything with anything other than first a denial. But I think what works really well for him is that he’s actually incredibly effective at what he says after his denial. 

Michael (12:04) 

Okay, but don’t go there yet because that’s a different.

Katie Cronen:  

I’m not, I’m not –

Michael Maslansky:

Okay

Katie Cronen:

I’m just saying like, even though he denied, denied, denies, I don’t really think that’s what works well for him. I don’t think it really works well for anybody unless you’re a supporter and you’re just looking, whether it’s a company or a candidate, you’re just looking for somebody to say a strong no. 

Lee Hartley Carter:

Yeah. And you know, I would also argue that it’s something that used to work, but it no longer works. Like back there, there used to be a time where we trusted authority. If somebody said it wasn’t true, it wasn’t true. But now that doesn’t work because we have the internet. We can search, we can come up with our own facts. We can come up with our own story. We can come up with a broader narrative. And so the context is not just set by the person who’s delivering the message. The context is set all around it. And so I think that you know, was something that worked a long time ago and it doesn’t work today. 

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah, I would say, I mean, I hate this one. Like I want it not to work, I have to say. Like I feel like it shouldn’t work. I feel like for former president Trump, it did work in several cases. I think the question, you know, that I try and figure out is when can it work? And I think, know, Katie, I agree with you that like it’s, you can rally your base with the denial. Biden did it as well. Every surrogate was out there repeating it. You just have to make sure that there’s not another bad fact that proves that the denial was then just a lie. I mean, think that that is where the Biden campaign got into trouble. They denied, denied, denied, and then he debated and it was tough to continue to deny afterwards. And if a company goes out there and they want to deny something to be true, they better make sure that there is not going to be that next shoe to drop. I mean, and I think that’s where, like, if I think back over the scandals over either politicians or other people where they’ve rejected the idea that they were having an affair or that they did something nefarious and then another piece of information comes out, all of a sudden the denial kind of completely falls apart because there’s this other information out there. So it’s a high-risk move, it seems like, to go with the rejection approach. 

Lee Hartley Carter: 

Absolutely. 

Michael Maslansky:

So don’t deny, don’t reject. That’s what we’re saying. Okay. But so often instead of a rejection, cause as you’re going to see, they’re going to be four Rs here. Rejection being the first one. The second one is about rebutting. Right. And, and there it’s, you know, it’s not me. Yes, it’s true. 

Katie Cronen:

Mm. 

Lee Hartley Carter:

Just ask Boeing. 

Michael Maslansky:

but it’s not my fault or yes, it’s true, but it’s somebody else’s responsibility or yes, it’s true, but who cares? Right. And where do we see that? The second one is, is a rebuttal kind of the yes, but Lee. Take me through what we mean when we talk about rebuttals. What are we talking about 

Lee Hartley Carter:

So it’s acknowledging the truth but then shifting the blame. And it’s something I think that often backfires. It can work occasionally, but I think there are a lot of cases where this one doesn’t work. So I’ll give you an example from back in the financial crisis. There was a bank who acquired another bank, and the bank that they acquired had done some of the things and the things that led to the financial collapse with lending practices. So the bank that acquired them want to say, yes, but it wasn’t us. It was that company that we acquired and we’re changing things. And people would say, yes, but you own them. So you’re responsible for them. And you think back to some of the Boeing crisis. Yes, that happened, but it was the mechanic in charge of the door plug. It wasn’t us. And that can just really backfire because we want see people take responsibility if there’s truth. 

Katie Cronen:

We see it in the pharmaceutical industry quite a bit too. Yes, but it’s the pharmacy benefit managers who determine what people pay. They are these middlemen who negotiate huge savings for themselves and never pass it on to you. Yes, but it’s not our fault. It’s these other people who you should be more mad at. And what I think happens a lot, when the blame shifting is happening in the rebuttal is you get a yes but back to you. The consumers say, yes, but why is the list price so high to begin with? yes, but you’re still ultimately responsible for how we got here in the first place. So I think it triggers a very circular conversation that usually isn’t productive. 

Lee Hartley Carter (17:20) 

And you see it in politics again all the time. This is another one. Yes, the economy is a great, but I inherited it from my predecessor. Yes, this is going on, but it’s not my fault because it was the policies of the person that was in place before me. And exactly, Katie, as you say, what you get back is yes, but you’ve been president now for three years. So you own this or yes, but you had both houses of Congress in your party and things still didn’t get done. This one, I think the yes, but circular conversations are really, really damaging. 

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah, I think this is the biggest trap that our clients fall into. They want to have a rational debate. They want to bring reason to an emotional debate, right? Because ultimately this is about the of the judgments that people make that are kind of instant, that are based on their preconceived kind of biases and notions. And you often cannot explain them away, at least not initially, right? This is when companies say, we just need to educate people because they don’t understand. Let’s give them more information. But that’s not the way the human brain works. I think, you’ve got people inside an organization. They believe like, look, it wasn’t our fault. Somebody else, you know, left us with something. They did something. The world, you know, was different. And we, we had to deal with it. 

Michael Maslansky:

I just think that we as humans are kind of predisposed to reject blame shifting, that people who don’t acknowledge responsibility are seen as lacking credibility. Somebody else has to shift the blame. You can’t kind of do it. If I’m looking at you, you can’t point someplace else. And often I think, you what we find is that you can, there are ways to acknowledge some of the responsibility and then add information but that a straight rebuttal, yes, this is true, but it’s not my fault. It seems like it backfires so much more than it really works. 

Katie Cronen:

I feel like maybe there’s one mini exception and it’s, I feel like it can work if it’s in an internal message among rallying your troops. Like, yes, this happened, but we all know that there were other variables that were beyond our control that led us to this outcome. I think that could be an effective way to at least build team and say, look, I understand not everything was under our control. The challenge with that though is that messages that are shared internally very, very often make their way externally where you totally lose the benefit of the doubt. And then you just do seem like you’re whining. 

Michael Maslansky:

I think that’s right. And I think the places where it works, it’s structured in one of the other ways that people respond to bad facts. And it’s not just a, yes, it’s true, but it’s not me kind of rebuttal kind of thing. 

Lee Hartley Carter (20:36) 

And I would say this is really like human instinct is to do the yes but. I mean I –  

Michael Maslansky:

Always myth versus fact.

Lee Hartley Carter:

This is so many of our clients who are coming to us saying like, if people only knew XYZ, they wouldn’t think badly of us. And we’ve been telling them that. I don’t understand why, you know, why everybody doesn’t support us. If you look at, you know, foreign affairs, if you look at what’s going on in in the debate about Israel versus Palestine, if people only understood XYZ, then they would change their mind. And that’s just not the way we’re wired. Yes, this is bad, but did you know that they’re worse? Yes, this is, and it just, does not work especially when you’re trying to change somebody’s opinion it just seems like you are out of touch. 

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah. Now I do think maybe there’s an interesting situation where this is where when you communicate becomes really important because the, if, somebody confronts you with a bad fact, then rebutting it is like, or by shifting blame is going to be really hard. But if you anticipate it and you start to, you know, kind of change the conversation, focus on the context that changed. like the, you know, the economy is different or one of the, think, most effective ones for there is like consumer preferences have changed. And so we’ve changed. So the fact that we’ve changed is not bad because of that, that you might be able to get out in front of it and kind of explain it. I remember actually for another bank situation when banks were closing branches, and that was a bad fact of couldn’t deny that they were closing branches, but you could kind of recontextualize why you were closing branches. And if you did it ahead of time, then you might be able to get away with it. 

Katie Cronen:

Yeah, or when you think about companies that have made very public commitments to things they’re doing with the environment or the climate, if they’re able to anticipate and say, you know what, the way that we’re sourcing things has been a little bit harder than we anticipated or original plans were based on the technology getting up to pace and it hasn’t yet or like you said, Michael, like we thought consumers were headed in one direction, but as we’re watching how they’re behaving, they’re behaving a little bit differently. If it’s in that anticipatory way of, okay, so we have to actually change with the circumstances, then I think you get a little bit of a longer leash. 

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah. So, I think that’s right. So I think if we, if we look at the first two and we say kind of the rejection and the rebuttal are in many ways kind of a defensive play, right? It is a no, it didn’t happen or yes, it happened, but it wasn’t me. Right. I think the second two are really the places where, you have the opportunity to shape the conversation and the next one, which is it will be no surprise once we get into it, we are fans of is the reframe, which is not really, when it comes to the bad fact, what do we mean by 

Katie Cronen:

So I think when we talk about reframing, let’s just go back to like that glass of water, I don’t see it as half empty, I see it as half full. It’s way more than we used to have yesterday. Like you were just changing the context and saying, if you looked at the data differently, you would see what I see. 

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah, totally. It’s like any time that we say you’ve misinterpreted the data, it should be interpreted this way, or you’re looking at it wrong, or let me give you a different perspective on that same fact. We’re kind of turning a fact into something different. We’re reframing it. 

Katie Cronen: 

And we should say, know, good communicators aren’t actually explicitly saying you’re looking at it wrong. Usually they’re saying, huh, I have a different opinion. I look at it this way and that led me to this other conclusion. So for instance, let’s, you know, we’ve been talking about pharma pricing. There are good ways to reframe. There are less effective ways to reframe. One of the industry’s favorites had been drug pricing is really expensive, we don’t look at it that way. It’s only 15 % of overall spending on total healthcare costs. that perspective is, yes, we need to do something about the price of healthcare writ large, but drug pricing is only a teeny tiny portion of that. Now that backfired because it flew in the face of people’s truth, which was sure it may be 15 % of overall healthcare spending, but not, it’s not 15 % of my like out of pocket expense. I go to the pharmacy monthly and that’s the bill that really drives me up the wall versus, you know, how infrequently I might have to go to the hospital. So I would say that was an ineffective reframe because it wasn’t rooted in the audience’s actual perspective. It was still too rooted in the communicator’s perspective. Now on the flip side, same topic. Let’s take the same topic of pharma pricing. If a company said, to reframe it, sure, our price may have gone up on this particular drug, but we’ve recently implemented guidelines to limit the net increases across our portfolio and in many instances, actually what you’re paying, we are tracking and it’s going down. I think still a bad fact, but I think it’s better, it’s a better reframe than this initial approach. 

Lee Hartley Carter: 

And I also think it works better because you’re actually addressing what the concern is. Like, when people are complaining about pharma pricing, they’re not complaining about overall healthcare spending. They’re complaining about how much they have to spend for that pill. And so it’s like, you can reframe as long as it’s clear that you’re, we’re on the same page here. You get what I’m talking about. And so I think it’s interesting, because in politics, we see this too. If you think back to Trump running in 2016, he said people, criticized him. He’s a political outsider. And he said, yeah, I am a political outsider. I’m going to go down there and drain that swamp. You know, yeah, I’m a businessman, not a politician. I’m going to go make deals, most beautiful deals you’ve ever seen. He reframed the fact in a way that addressed what people were thinking about. Now, some people might not like the reframe, but a lot of people that were in his target audience and in the voters that support him were like, exactly, that’s what I want. I want a fighter. 

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah, he is about the best intuitive reframer that there is. And it’s important if you hate him to appreciate what he’s doing. Because it’s powerful. I’m not a criminal. I’m a patriot. They are the January 6 hostages like it doesn’t always work. And it’s not always grounded in the truth. 

Lee Hartley Carter:

And he does this consistently.

Katie Cronen: 

Mm-hmm. 

Michael Maslansky:

And you can say lots of things, but the idea that he gets it and he looks at something and he finds a way to flip it on its head and get people to look at it a different way in a way that they can kind of buy into. Now, it’s his supporters goes back to the kind of like, which audiences does it work with? But the fundamental idea is a really powerful one of how to take something that is a fact that could be a bad fact, flip it around. You know, turn it inside out and say, actually it’s something entirely different.

Lee Hartley Carter:

Yeah, I didn’t pay my taxes. That makes me smart. And most recently, when he’s being criticized as a threat to democracy, said, a threat to democracy? I just took a bullet for democracy. He does it all the time. 

Katie Cronen:

Mm-hmm. Or they’re coming after me because they don’t like you. I stand for you. So everything that they launch toward me is an attack on you.

Michael Maslansky: 

And the thing that I think is important for companies to think about when they try and do this is that the thing that does work for him is that the reframe is intuitively connected to something that the people who support him or are on the edge of support or even people who don’t like him, they can intuitively respond to it in a positive way. And he’s able to tap into that in a way that is, it’s pretty extraordinary. It’s, I think one of the most critical elements of his success has been his ability to do that. And when you go back to like pharma pricing, you know, it is, it’s not the list price, it’s the price you pay. And if I can focus on the price you pay and that price is better, which it isn’t always, but then I’m going to take that price fact and kind of flip it on its head and say, you’re, focusing on the wrong number. or, we’ll get to the other ways of, kind of changing the conversation about, about price. But if you’re just talking about it there, or, if a company is changing their commitments of kind of reframing it as they shift away from something to a shift to something. Right. We are not moving away from our commitments. We are moving to these more important commitments. And I think that that is, it can be really effective. 

Katie Cronen: 

I often wonder too on Biden’s age, if there could have been more that they could have done to reframe effectively age equals experience and wisdom, right? So if his team or if he had said, it doesn’t really matter whether or not I walk well or speak quickly. What matters is that I have these longstanding relationships with these people around the world that I can draw upon. It’s why I can call Netanyahu and speak to him in a way that not anybody else could. It’s why I can reach across the aisle in ways that not everybody else could. That comes from being 81 or however old he is. I think that they played around with a reframe like that several months ago, maybe a year ago. But it feels like they shied away from it. And I wonder if that could have been more effective for them if used better and more frequently earlier on.

Lee Hartley Carter:

You know, it’s interesting, Katie, because I think in the sort of three weeks post-debate, there was a number of different strategies that they tried to employ. And one of them was the reframe of and I think he said, you know, I may not walk as fast as I used to and I may not talk the same way, but I am and he tried to do it. But I think it was too late because he had spent too much time denying. And so there was an inherent lack of trust. 

Katie Cronen:

Yeah, his, yeah, and his, I am was just, but I am sharp and I am ready to go. It’s like, well, that wasn’t, that wasn’t quite the right conclusion, I think, to make. 

Michael Maslansky:

Well, and this is also, mean, you compare where Biden was to where Reagan was and, know, where he said, I want you to know, I will not make age an issue in this campaign. I will not exploit for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience. Right. Like, and, he flipped that bad fact right on its head, but he was able to, you know, he was able to stand behind the kind of make the case that age was not a problem in ways that Biden certainly was not. 

Katie Cronen:

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

Michael Maslansky: 

All right. So we’ve got, reject rebut reframe. And the last one is to replace. Like you’re looking in the wrong place entirely. It’s not about, rejecting that fact or telling you why it’s not important or trying to change the way you interpret it. It actually doesn’t matter because you should be looking over here. So what does it mean to replace? A bad fact. 

Lee Hartley Carter: 

Well, it’s acknowledging that something might be true, but it’s not what matters. So I think Trump does this one sometimes, too. I feel like we’re spending a lot of time on him. everybody knows this trial was a sham. Yes, there was a guilty conviction there. Everybody knows that was a trial of shame. look at the results. I’ve never had a better fundraising day in my life. It’s going to energize and galvanize us. And the party has never been more united. It’s like, what just happened there? 

Katie Cronen:

Or the pharmaceutical industry, if they’re talking about, we understand this is expensive, but what we’re doing is really important. We are innovating to save lives. Look at how far we’ve come in the past couple of years. Diagnoses that were once a death sentence have become manageable chronic conditions. That happens because of investment in R&D which we refuse to pull back on.

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah, I mean, think this is the place where, we often say if you’re defending, you’re losing, you know, if you can go change the battlefield and find a different place to, to focus the conversation, you’re going to be much more effective. And that is that you know, we, for pharma, we’re going to be focused every day on the lives that we save, you know, and like every time the conversation moves there and look at how many lives that we save, look at these innovative medicines. They are not here. They would not be here otherwise. You’re starting to kind of replace the bad fact in an ingredient context, if there’s a situation where there are questions of safety, you know, and we’re in one situation now where there are, I would say dubious questions about the health risks of a product and risk of products being taken off the shelf and the flip is not necessarily to defend the safety or to talk more about the safety because sometimes you break into jail, instead it’s to replace the conversation with one about choice. Who should be deciding what products you use? This is government overreach, is a replacement of an action that the government might take. So it is, instead of responding or addressing the fact itself, it’s basically saying that there is a different fact or different concept or idea that you should focus on instead. And often like we’re looking at laddering of values. Like what’s the most important value to people in this case, right? Is it X or Y? Is it the, in some ways, it price or is it value? Is it short-term versus long-term? Is it really tangible benefits versus kind of broader societal benefits? What are the different ways that we can look at the pros and cons of an issue and find the one that people care about the most? And if it isn’t associated with that bad fact, then reorient people to really what matters most. 

Katie Cronen:

Yeah, I’m reminded of some of the work that we did working with an automotive company who had to deal with criticism that their commitments to battery electric vehicles weren’t as high as some of their competitors. They seem to be shying away from EVs. And when they had a conversation that replaced that criticism and said, “Look, what we really care about is reducing carbon as much as possible as fast as possible. And we believe that an approach that is going to achieve that isn’t necessarily about being all in on one type of vehicle. It’s an all of the above approach that includes includes electric vehicles, but also includes hybrids, also includes other kinds of low fuel or low carbon emitting options so that we can all get there to that goal faster. We tested it, it was super compelling even among environmentalists.”

Michael Maslansky: 

Yeah, that was a really interesting case because you couldn’t kind of at that point say that directly just kind of reject the idea that 100 % EVs were a bad strategy. You had to change the conversation. So when we said like 80 % of the population around the world does not have access to electric infrastructure, right? So how are going to get them to buy EVs? All of a sudden, the fact that we were not pursuing 100% EV strategy made a lot more sense. 

Katie Cronen: 

My favorite look over here from that one was a fact that we found that was something about like three quarters of Spain’s population lives in apartments and condos, not homes that have access to 120 volt outlet. So, you know, they’re not going to be able to have a parking space where they can charge their cars every night. They’re just not going to adopt it that way. Shouldn’t we design options so that they can lower their carbon too? 

Michael Maslansky:

Amazing. All right. So you’ve got a bad fact. The initial reaction in many cases to deny. We decided that deny or reject is not the best case. So we’re anti-rejection. Rebut many people fall into because it’s the rational approach. It’s the emotionally satisfying because I get to kind of prove my point that I’m right and you’re wrong. But rebuttals really are often ineffective because they don’t meet the audience where they are. And so then you move to reframe where it’s basically changing the way you look at that fact and kind of shaping how we perceive it from half empty to half full or replacing it with something that’s more valuable. And so communicators, marketers, when you’re out there, probably more communicators and you’ve got a fact that feels bad. Reject the instinct to deny it or rebut it. Think about reframing or replacing it. And, and I think you’ll be much more effective or you know what else you can do is you can call us. 

Lee Hartley Carter:

You can. And I think the thing that’s so interesting about the second two is even though you might have bad facts, it can actually create an opportunity for you to, I’ll give you another R, reconnect with your audience because it can show that you get what’s going on. It can show that you really are in touch with them. And so I think it really does offer an opportunity to rebuild trust. 

Michael Maslansky:

Awesome. Well, thank you, Katie and Lee, as always. Thanks to everybody for listening in. Please feel free to reach out and tell us what you think. And for more language insights and to be in the loop on all the other fun stuff we’re doing, please follow us on LinkedIn at Maslansky and Partners or go to maslansky.com/connect. That is all for now. Stay tuned for more episodes of Hearsay because when it comes to truly effective communications. It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.