Communication mistakes I made at Google

Shunyao: Awesome. Again, thank you so much for being here. So for this talk, I would like you to turn on your camera if you can. Cause I really want to connect with you and see your reaction to the talk. But I understand not everyone can do that, so it’s totally if you're comfortable with it, please don't bring your camera.

Shunyao: So before we get started, want to get a sense of who is in the room today? So we're going to use this tool called slido.com. So essentially, if you just like, type in slido.com and put in the four or the six numbers here, It's, 2 6, 3, 2 7 6 and then you should be able to see a poll. So for example here. Yeah. Where did you grow up? So essentially want to get a sense of what kind of background do people have? And as soon as you type in an answer, it will show up in this poll.

Shunyao: Canada. Great. I see quite a variety of people here. We have a very diverse group. Awesome.

Shunyao: Yes. Yes. Great. Awesome. We have a very, very diverse group. And thank you so much for joining no matter where you are, no matter if it's morning or evening. Thank you so much for being here. We’re going to move on to the next question? You will still have a chance to join if you didn’t join for the last question.

Shunyao: So how many years have you been working in an English environment? As in like English is the main language you use at work?

Shunyao: Yeah, this is great. All, a lot of you have worked the in English environment for more than eight years. That's a lot of years. 15 years. Oh, 19 years. I see a lot of people in higher numbers in the chat.

Shunyao: This is awesome. Cool. And, last question. So when you communicate at work in English, do any of these resonate with you? I'm lost, I don't understand what other people are talking about. Having trouble explaining complicated things. I disagree, but I can't convince others. You can choose all three, if you want to.

Shunyao: Nice. Cool. Looks like the biggest challenges that people have here is to explain complicated things. I totally resonate with that because a lot of the technical concepts are just like, have so many nuances that you have to explain. So that's totally true.

Shunyao: Awesome. So those are really common challenges for non-native English speakers, and I believe that's why you're here. So we're going to dive deep into this. If you have any questions you can put in the chat, you can raise your hand and I'll try to do a lot of Q&A at the end. Sounds good?

Shunyao: Cool. I want to start by sharing a little bit of my own journey. So I grew up in China and I moved to America in 2013 for my PhD in electronic engineering. So in China, even though we learn English in schools, but it was purely optimized for exams and we didn't really have any chances to actually use the language. So when I first got to America for my PhD, I remember every single group meeting, my advisor and I just cannot understand each other. And I had to rely on someone who knew my word. I'll have him sit in my meetings and he will rephrase everything that I said to my advisor.

Shunyao: And then in the, in the, sorry, what do I do? A lot of things happened in the past nine years. I did multiple different career pivots. I started from academia to engineering industry to UX design, eventually to product management. And eventually I chose to be a product manager. That was a totally different story that if you're interested, I can talk about that in another day. But for the struggle with communication has been a theme throughout most of these years. And I was this really, really quiet person. I was insecure. I was afraid of speaking up. I did not know how to present my work. I did not know how to convince people. And especially later as a product manager, I have to deal with a lot of different stakeholders. And there were just a lot of challenges for someone who did not speak English growing up.

Shunyao: But slowly, I learned how to do these things. And I also noticed that a lot of people around me have struggling with the same thing. So the last year I started “Communicate at Work.” It's a school and a community to help non-native English speakers to communicate better at work. So I teach courses and design exercises for people like you to practice together.

Shunyao: So today I will share a couple of stories and learnings from, from my experience. And hopefully that will be helpful to you. So coming back to these common challenges at the beginning, I'm lost I'm having trouble explaining things, I disagree but I can't convince others. So typically what people think is I need to improve my English. And that's what people tell you as well, you know, just hey, improve your English. But it’s so much more than that, because think about it even in your native language sometimes to my still have challenges explaining things concisely, you might still have challenges giving me a speech or dealing with conflict.

Shunyao: So it's not just improving the English, but it's more about, I need to rethink how I communicate. And that is mindset. That is framework, that is structure, and empathy. So for a lot of you, especially those of you who have worked in English environment for awhile, learning a new word or polish your grammar does not move the needle that much, but shifting the mindset on communication can make a huge difference.

Shunyao: And I also want to say, it is harder in English, because when you were talking part of your brainpower to has to be used to think about this foreign language. So it takes even more practice to turn the skills into muscle memory. So for today, I'll focus more on the mindset communication, through my personal stories. And now, if any of the stories resonate with you, so please put a plus one in the chat so that I know that I'm not the only person having the stories and it's helpful for other people to see how common it is as well.

Shunyao: Cool. so starting with our first story, which is also my first mistake. So “I didn't understand it. It must be my problem.” It's the feeling that I had over and over again, especially in group conversations. So we used to have weekly group meetings, like a team of seven or eight people. We talked about lots of different things. And even though not everything we discussed is directly relevant to my work, but I still want you to learn more and actively engage with them. So I really tried hard to follow and pay attention to these meetings.

Shunyao: But almost always, at some point I missed something. I hesitate to interrupt how the conversation went on and I was still thinking about it. So I missed even more things. And before I knew it, it was, I was completely lost and I had no idea what they're talking about anymore. And for a while, I just pretend that I know what was going on. You know, I'm nod along, I smile when they smile. But after awhile I just gave up, started looking at my phone, I turn off the camera and mic if it's like a remote meeting, and when it happens over and over again, every week, I just started to feel like, hey I'm not part of this meeting. They don't need me and I don't even want to be here. So I stopped trying and sometimes I don't even show up.

Shunyao: So when I think about it, there is this notion of, when I don't understand things, it must be my problem because everyone else seem to understand what they're talking about. It must be my problem because, because my English is not good because I don't understand basic things because I zoned out or I wasn't paying attention. It must be my problem. And I don't want to highlight that problem. So I don't say anything and that's why I hesitate to ask questions. I ee a lot of the plus ones, so we can put plus wine that resonates with you.

Shunyao: Until at one point, there was a new person joining the team, and he never shies away from asking questions, you know, all sorts of questions like, hey, sorry, what was this experiment about? And other people will explain to them very nicely and be like, oh yeah, I should have shared more context. It was about so and so. Or, hey sorry, I didn't follow what you just said. Could you explain this again? And other people, again, they will be very, very understanding like, hey, here is another way to understand it. And in that process, I noticed two things. Number one, very often I had the same questions and it just helps me realize that it's not just me who have the questions and, you know, people had the same questions as well. It's not just my problem. Second, even though, even though, some of the questions are really basic, but it's still helped the speakers to recognize the gap and realize that, hey, not everyone has the context of everything. And again, nobody ever judged the new person and people really appreciate how active and engaged he was. And he quickly pick up everything, he shared his opinions and very soon he became the core of the team.

Shunyao: So inspired by him. I started to ask questions as well, you know, hey, I didn't understand this is the conclusion that's in that just like all kinds of questions. It just like stopped, stopped thinking too much about myself. And again, people really, really appreciate that. And so instead of like me sitting back, camera off, mic off, and just like do whatever that I'm doing. Now I'm a lot more engaged. I know what they're talking about. I can chime in with my opinions and I'm just like, I feel like I'm part of the team now, I'm part of this meeting. And what's even more interesting was that they also started to explain things more clearly. They started realize that, oh, not everyone has the same context, so I'm going to lay out all the context here. And so here's the context, here is the question, and here are the important takeaways. It's not just for me, it brings a lot of clarity to the whole team. So everyone, everyone wins.

Shunyao: And now the takeaway of that really, really short story is, number one, all the fear was in my head. No, I thought it was stupid questions. I thought it was just like me not understanding new things, but, nobody thought it was stupid and, or held it against me and it's that the really enjoyed that I do that, but most importantly, number two, my questions not only helped other listeners in the meeting, but also help the speakers to recognize the gap. So instead of thinking aboutㄝ I didn't understand it it must be my problem. Now I started to think about it. Hey, it's just a gap in communication. It's not my problem. And here's the opportunity to bridge the gap because when the speaker say something and I didn't get it, there is like a mismatch in that person delivering the message or receiving that message. And when there's a gap and I don't understand it, I want to highlight itso that everyone knows that, hey here's a gap and they will be able to fill it.

Shunyao: Now tactically, I recognize that it doesn't work for every single meeting because there are meetings that are just like huge and you don't have time to like interrupt every time and ask your questions. But usually there are two ways to do it. The first way is to ask publicly, as in like, when it's like a short, smaller meeting, it's like code team with like, you know, less than 10 or 15 people. Usually I'll do hey, just to make sure I understand it correctly, do you mean this and that or? Hey, just to recap, the conclusion is this or just to make sure I'm taking the notes correctly, here's the takeaway, is that right? But that's one way to do it.

Shunyao: And obviously another way is to just to ask privately, you do this whenever you are not super comfortable, like, doing this publicly. So one way to do this is, you ping them in the meeting. Hey, sorry, what was that? I didn't get it. Or you ask after the meeting, hey, I missed the part when we talked about this particular thing, does it mean so and so. And if at some point you realize that you just completely lost and you don't even know what questions to ask. And this is, this is more, more common than when you just joined a new team and you have no basic idea of what's going on. So in this case, outside of dedicated time with a team member and just be like, can you help me understand the basics?

Shunyao: Now, again, depending on situation, you can choose either approach, but most importantly it is, the bottom line is to recognize that asking questions is a healthy thing. It's not only helpful for the whole team, but also for the speakers as well. Same goes for this meeting. If you ask questions, then that's a signal to me that, oh, like I didn't explain something clearly and I will be able to correct that. So please ask question if you do. I already see you ask a couple of questions in the chat, haven't had a chance to have gone through this yet, but we'll come back to this at the end.

Shunyao: Cool. Moving onto the second mistake, second story that I had. This was back when I was a software engineer. We had those stand-ups or one-on-ones with our managers. Basically everyone talk a little bit about what they have worked on. And my, like my usual way is to just like think, okay, I need to say A, B and C and I said it and that's it. And fairly often I realized that when people ask me questions about the things that I said, I often used to go to two extremes and certain questions. One extreme is I just answered with like less than five words, you know? Yes, no, like this is the number or like, that sounds great. Another extreme is I go to I just go along and all and rant only about like a lot of details that nobody cared about. So for example, in a standup, my manager would ask me, hey, how's the progress? And I will say, I completed the experiment. And then my manager was like, okay sure, what is the experiment result? And I will say 3%. And then the manager is like, wait, what is 3%, 3% of what? Can you say more?

Shunyao: And I started kind of rambling. You know we implemented it this way and we use this configuration. I will change to this and push it to 10%. And before the change data is like this and after change data, like data is like that. At some point, my manager finally started to interrupt me. Okay. So, sure. What is your conclusion, what is your point? Can you just like get to the point? While I had this long-winded conversation, I noticed that there are always some people who can get straight to the point. So again, same kind of questions. How's the progress? And they can just like go directly, oh, this metric is improved by 3%, that's better than what we expected. This means we're closer to the competitor and we can potentially get another 2% in the future.

Shunyao: Now, I don't know how much that resonated with you. You can put in a plus one and if that resonates. But for me, I can clarity see the differences, but I just don't know why. And the way that I try to justify that is I'm just not good at solving my work. You know, I don't know how to talk about it. I don't know how to impress people or show my value while other people can just like, you know, talk about the things that make them look good. Until I became a PM. And when I was a PM, I suddenly, I was on the other side of the table. And again, we're having stand-ups, you know, the same type of conversations. You accept that I'm the person asking questions. And as the conversation goes, I really felt the frustration, because every single back and forth all I was thinking is, can you talk about the things I cared about? You know, which is okay, what does this result mean? Is this what we expected? Is this good enough? Can we trust the data? Can we improve more? What is next? And like, but like in that whole conversation, like they're just not answering the question. And that's when I realized that it's not really about saying too much or saying too little or selling how much work you've done. It's really about your audience.

Shunyao: Like. Well, what information to include entirely depends on what your audience want to you. So instead of thinking about, I said, what I needed to say, you should think about it as like, I said what they want to know, you know, if they want to know about next steps, I'll talk a bit about that. If they want to know the implementation details, I'll talk about that. If they are like a partner teams that will be affected by my work, I will talk about implications. So I would try to frame my message based on what my audience care about.

Shunyao: Now. Obviously the obvious question is how do you know what they want to know? Right. Now there again, I'm going to tell you two ways to do this. Now one way is to predict what they want to know. So again, for the same example, when people ask about what the results are, if this person is like a manager, so they probably don't really care about the implementation details. They probably care more about the high level goals. What does the result mean? Right. Can we trust the data? Is this what we expected, what's next? So that's probably what the manager will care about. And similarly, this also applies to interviews. If you are in these behavioral interviews, you know, when a recruiter or hiring manager asks you, what is their weakness? No, they don't really actually interested in your weakness, what they really want to know is, does this person reflect on themselves? Are they actively working on this? Will this weakness affect the job? So that's one way to do this, trying to predict whether they want to know.

Shunyao: Okay. Now a second way to do this is just ask. This is very, very obvious, right? typically what I do is, hey, like I can talk about all of these other things, but I want to know anything specific you're interested in so that I can frame my conversation around that. But bottom line is no matter it’s predict or ask, the most important thing is trying to first think about what they want to know and give them that information, instead of just thinking about here's all what I need to say, like you should think about here, here's probably what they want to do. And that was the second story.

Shunyao: Now, moving onto the third mistake that I made in the past, which is I need to prove my point. So this is very common, when you disagree with others, when you want to talk about your own opinion, if you want to make your point. I failed miserably on that. So, early in my career, I would, I was assigned to solve this complicated design problem. Essentially people didn't know how to use our product and we need to teach them. Without going into too much details. it's not a product that consumers are used to. It's kind of like a, like a new concept we need to teach people about it's about like mindset changes, which is what, which is what makes it complicated.

Shunyao: So my designer and I spend a lot of time thinking about this. We made a lot of prototypes with a lot of user research. We kind of looked at all the competitors and we just like did a lot of analysis because it is a hard problem. But at some point my manager came in to me and be like, hey Shunyao, let's launch a tooltip. Tooltip is like, you know, those kinds of little tips to tell you what kind of UI this is. And my immediate reaction is, you know, it's not as simple as that. The won’t actually solve the real problem. And if this is simple as that, I would have done this, right? So and both my designer and I thought it wouldn't work. And we were just like sitting together and be like, you know, this wouldn't work. How can we convince my manager to not do this? So we sat down together and came up with seven reasons of why this wouldn't work. We write it down and we tried to use that to convince my manager.

Shunyao: So it was at the end of a work day. So this was pre-COVID. Also, we were still working in person. At the end of the work day, I found my manager, I brought them into a conference room, and I just like started drawing on a whiteboard and saying we shouldn't do this for these several reasons. Number one, because this, then this, and number two and this and this. And I just like started going on and on about why we shouldn’t do this. And now I think about it, if you're a manager and it just like suddenly got cornered and they're like, oh, like you shouldn't do this. You'll probably also feel attacked. So it wasn't a good strategy to start with. But very interesting, my manager, like he also, wasn't very interested in the reason that I gave to him. So he interrupted me when I was talking about the third point and he was just. You know, I don't care. I don't really care about anything that you said here. we're launching a tool tip. I want you to disagree and commit. And now I'm late for my shuttle and I have to run. And then he left.

Shunyao: And obviously I was frustrated, you know, I prepared all those reasons and evidence and nobody cared about it. I felt like my input wasn't valued. I felt like I don't know how to, how to convince people to do the right thing. So I still launched the tool tip. And the next week, my manager came to me and he's like hey, thanks for launching the tool kit. I know this is not the best solution, but it's very simple. It's easy to reverse. I just need to see some data. And now I think about it, you know, it was so obvious, you know, it was iterations. Right. You know, it started with the low hanging fruit and, you know, some will work and some wouldn't and like, if it, if it wouldn't work, that's fine. You're just like, you know, move on and iterate on that. But at the time, I didn't even think about it. You know, I was so much in my own head that I can only see my side of story. I was too busy proving my point without understanding their perspectives at all. I didn't even ask any questions. I just like, just go in and I'd be like, that's wrong, you're wrong, and I'm right. And here are all the reasons why you are wrong. And if I can do this again, I'll probably ask, hey, like, what is the goal? If the goal is to get more data, you know, maybe we can brainstorm even more low hanging fruit where we can get some quick data.

Shunyao: And, by the way, this manager, so he actually taught me a lot of these kinds of things, like how to align with their stakeholders, how to align your goals, how to deal with conflict. And he just like, this is just like one example of how I learned from this. But he was also very, very actively teaching me about these things. So I really appreciate that.

Shunyao: And over many years, I've seen lots of conflicts like this. You know, when there are disagreements, people treat it as a debate and argue, you know, I need to say my point loud and clear, and I'm going to find floss in your arguments because you're wrong, I'm right. And here are all the reasons why you're wrong. But really it’s about listening and asking what are the goals that people have and sit together and let's figure this out. Let's solve this problem together so that we can meet both of our goals.

Shunyao: So I want to quickly pause here. That was quick three short stories in my past. So I'm going to pause for a second and ask all of you. What is your biggest takeaway from the three stories? You can put in the chat. You can also mute yourself and just talk about it.

Shunyao: Different kinds of conflicts.

Shunyao: Confidence.

Shunyao: Learn to listen.

Shunyao: Don't be afraid to ask,

Shunyao: Communicate and align, understand your goals, know your audience. Yeah. I really, really love all of these.

Shunyao: Is there a thing called asking too much? We can talk about this after. Yeah. So again, again, it's, I think the core takeaway of all of that three stories is to realize that communication is a two-way street. It's not just like you say something and that's it, but it's really about if the other person get what you tried to say, same way reverse, you know, what other people say, something, if you didn't get it, then that's a gap in communication. And so it's really about thinking in other people's shoes and having that kind of empathy. So, that kind of goes into lots of different communication challenges that if we're interested, we can go into details.

Shunyao: So want to do a quick recap and then we'll go into questions. So number one, when you're lost, instead of thinking, hey, I didn't understand it. It must be my problem. And recognize that it's simply a gap in communication and treat it as an opportunity to bridge that gap. Second, you know, we are talking about your work. We're answering the question instead of just saying what you want to say, think more about what other people want to know. And thirdly, when there are disagreements, instead of just like proving your points and the first thing you want to understand what other people's goals are, and then figure out how to achieve all of their goals together.

Shunyao: Now that was just the tip of the iceberg. If you're interested in learning more about workplace communication systematically, I'm also teaching a bootcamp on this very specific fields. It's a four weeks of bootcamp plus a community to practice together. It's designed specifically for people like you, like non-native English speakers and we cover topics like how to be concise, how to get on the same page, how to ask for something, how to disagree, and how do you talk about something that bothers you without hurting other people's feelings. And usually at the end of the bootcamp, we ask everyone what is the learnings that they have. And just to give you a sense of what the past have learned, I'm just going to show you three very, very short clips, so that you have a sense.

Clip 1: In the presentation or have the meeting with other people. I always like directly into the details. I want to say. So people always get lost what I'm trying to say. So after a course, I know I should start with some background information or summarize the purpose of doing this and then go to the details after that. So that'd be super helpful.

Shunyao: Just quick, quickly turn on the volume. So that was present more clearly, getting, showing more context.

Clip 2: I tried to organize my knowledge and behaviors through frameworks and for communication before this, because I don't really know how do I just structure or find the framework to guide all my communication behaviors. And I favor this through this course, I find the framework. So going forward, it's easier for me to tune my communication style based on all the frameworks I learned here.

Shunyao: So that was a framework is structured.

Clip 3: I think the how to address conflict helps me the most because it's very practical in it. Conflicts happen a lot in the past. I just had no idea how to drive the conversation. Either let others to make the final decisions. That let others to solve the confliction. And now I think there's a very clear, structured way for me to follow. The main point is just to try and to understand others’ contacts, others’ points, that's super helpful.

Shunyao: Okay. Awesome. so it is a very comprehensive bootcamp with a lot of exercises. And we really try to maximize the value you get with only a third of the price of typically other bootcamps charge you, because I resonate with all of the pain points that you have. So if you're interested, you can find more information in this website, applications open now, and early bird still at the end of this week, And they're also info sessions if you have more questions on the bootcamp. So I will just like paste the information here if you have, if you're interested, you can take a look.

Shunyao: Okay. I'll pause here. Any questions on anything that I talked about? You can come off, mute and chat about and talk, ask questions.

Shunyao: If not, I will also just like start looking at a chat. Since there are quite a bit of a chat, history, anything want to, anyone wants to call out your question again?

Shunyao: You get a link to the recording? Yes.

Attendee: Hello. Can you hear me there?

Shunyao: Yes, please.

Attendee: Hello everyone. I made a comment there at the end, and this is something that I've always told other people that I work with or that my friends or I meet that are non-English speaking people. Is that, we as immigrants into this country have a moral duty to learn the language and pronounce it properly. I'm originally from Colombia and this is what I tell all other people from my country that come here and have a job here or whatever. I hear them talking and they're just stomping over the language and I'm thinking, I mean, seriously, we are the ones that made the decision in one way or another to come. Why are we having Americans go through the excruciating experience of having to deal with our accent? Plus on top of that, well, there's not we can't help it. Some of us really tried. And it's not about removing the accent. It's about pronouncing properly. So why are we having Americans have to deal with we, when we are not pronouncing the language properly.

Attendee: I hear people just stomping over the English language and I'm like jeez. I mean, come on, give me a break. If you came here, put in an effort to learn how to say the R instead of the rrr, don't say three, say tree, don't say three. Say tree. I mean, so you have to learn those different inflections in where you put your tongue in your mouth and all that stuff. Come on, people, pronounce properly. So when we're in these meetings, like sometimes I'm on my phone because or we're on our phone. Many of us do it. And we have teams on or zoom on or whatever, and you have a non-English speaking person stomping the language improper, just horribly speaking, you can barely understand what they're saying on the phone. I mean, on our laptops or computers, whatever, it's a little more, it's a little easier because we have a better sound system, but on the phone we have this speaker, which is horrible by default. And so it's very, very hard to understand some people.

Attendee: So please. Make an effort to learn how to pronounce the language. Here's another piece of advice. It's all about the dynamic in the relationships with English speaking people. And when I say dynamics is that these are the things that they don't teach us. This is what I tell everybody. They don't teach these kinds of things in English class. So that's why I'm asking. That's, that's kind of the thing I say before I talk to someone or I'm going to talk to in a meeting or do a presentation. English is not my first language. So bear with me. I say that as well. And, some things that they don't teach us in English classes, the figures of speech. Like I just said, GCP. So you need to, you kind of want to learn all these figures of speech, so you know how to incorporate them in your own day to day when you're talking English. So you don't come across as he doesn't know what he's saying. He doesn't know what to say. He doesn't know what he wants to convey. He doesn't know what he's even worse in this technical side of, of, of the industry. He doesn't know what he's talking about and we know what we're talking about.

Shunyao: Yeah. that's, that's a really good point. You know, I think accent is underrated. Is that a word. Like people don't pay enough attention to the accent. So I'll give you an example because it is right, the accent is part of a culture, but it will become a problem if people can't understand it. So for me, I actually went through accent training. So before that I was really struggling with like s versus th like s versus th I guess. So I would say first and people will think I was saying fourth or the other way around. But I started realize that people just don't understand me and they'll just ask me like twice when I say things. And that's when I realized, oh, you know, accent has actually become a barrier in communication. So that's when I went to accent coaches.

Shunyao: Awesome. So yeah, I saw a couple of questions in the chat. If I'm pronouncing her name correctly. I'm sorry if I didn't, is there a thing called, asking too much? So, if I understand correctly, you were talking about asking too many questions? Do you want to come off mute and say somthing.

Attendee: Hi, do you hear me?

Shunyao: Yes, please.

Attendee: Hi everyone. Yeah, basically, I actually have the reverse of the problem that you explained there was from the problem that explained on the first slide that I'm pretty extroverted. And, and I'm very honest about in a meeting when I don’t understand. And sometimes, it happens to me that, it happens a lot of times that I am the one asking a lot of questions. And that kind of it's okay in the beginning when you're joining a company, but still, It happens to me a lot. And I'm like, is this a bad thing? Is this a good thing? Sometimes I'm like always confused, what do you think as a product manager or what’s your opinion on that?

Shunyao: Yeah. I'll say the only time that I think it would be a problem is that, this meeting has limited time and we want to. Like, you know, decide on something, within a limited time. And, that's when I think, questions can sometimes use more time than we thought. But other than that, I don't think that there is a problem usually like when you ask questions, that's a great way for people to just like, have a conversation and making sure everyone understands each other. And in that case, when the conference had limited time, typically I would say, hey, like, let's talk about this offline. Let's first get through this agenda and we'll talk about more offline. So that's what I usually will say. Try to pick up on these skills like this. if you notice that everyone else is trying to talk about something else and so maybe just like you can save your questions at the end or offline.

Attendee: I do think that this is something also a big cultural and team culture and micro-cultures related. So I would like best suggest, you know, talking to the team and your manager. I ask them to give you a better feedback. if you have any concerns in terms of, you know, too many questions, and this is not something that the team is appreciating, or if you need to change the way you are physically operating inquisitiveness. Because I do see that, you know, a different culture, particularly, people, handled, you know, curiosity a bit different are interruptions a bit differently.

Shunyao: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for adding that.

Shunyao: I'm sure I didn't pronounce it correctly. You mentioned you didn't catch the first point. Can you say more about what was confusing to you?

Shunyao: I guess maybe I didn't pronounce it properly. Does anyone else also didn't catch the first point?

Shunyao: So I'll quickly try to re-explain this a little bit, but if I still didn't answer your question, you can stay on, at the end of this meeting and I will stay on for a little bit more just to chat more. I think the first point again, the whole point is trying to break the notion that when you have a question, like you just don't say anything and just don't ask it because you're not confident enough that to ask the question and you feel kind of self-conscious about it. What I tried to say is, questions is a really, really healthy thing because, it makes the speaker to know that that they didn't deliver the message clearly. So for example, this is an excellent example because I thought I talked about the first point clearly and you didn't get it, and that's totally fine because that's a signal to me that maybe there's something that I should have said that it didn't say.

Shunyao: Cool. Let's move on to the next question. Conflict ask why sometimes why itself doesn't make sense. Are you still there? If you are here, do you want to say more about this?

Attendee: Yeah, I mean, I read I think on your website that, or at least the dealing with conflicts, how do you deal with conflict? It's about, ask why understand other people's opinion? My observation is it's that's half the time you can't, it's not about English. It's about just difference of opinion. So the conflict stays. So I was just tyring to wonder when you have a conflict of why, what is it you're intending to understand just different point of view. And, and then, but there hasn't been no agreement with the point of view.

Shunyao: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Attendee: So acceptance of that point of view.

Shunyao: Yeah, like this is actually a lot bigger problem than just like asking why. But the reason I said asking why is because typically people don't say why, or don't say the actual why. So typically when you have a conflict, let's say, okay, I think this button should be blue and you think this button should be green. And because it looks better, you know, like, you know, you both think it looks better in different ways. But if you just like focus on that and your head against head on like which color it should be, but you really, you should ask more about like, you know, what's beneath it. Yu know, why do you think blue is better than green? And maybe they'll tell you about like a different time of a different website that they have used before and how that changed our experience. So essentially most of the conflicts are on the surface, but the conflict has so many other things that's beneath it that comes from your cultural experience, your context your assumptions. And you just, the only way is trying to, I call this ask open-ended diagnostic questions you ever heard of that? But you try to diagnose what is the real problem I try to solve that.

Shunyao: Does that answer your question? Any other thoughts here?

Attendee: No, it just, I just wanted to share to my own experience in conflicts.

Shunyao: Yeah. And even in like, sorry, sorry to interrupt.

Attendee: No, nothing. That, that, that's the only one that it's sometimes just the acceptance logically does not like, I mean, it's, I mean, everybody has their own frame of reference and logic, and then you say, no, it doesn't make sense. Why? And then sometimes at times you just have to let go. That's the only way I could find, I think over the conflicts.

Shunyao: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like picking your battles also a way to do this, so you don't have to fight on every single thing. But like, this is a good strategy is like you, you know how to do it and just choose one to use that..

Shunyao: Well there's the next question? Pronunciation will be easier. I think that's a statement. Does anyone else have questions? Can you can just come off mute or raise your hand?

Shunyao: What do I refer to for, for accent training? So, yeah, I had an accent coach, which is like a one-on-one session. but there's also this product called Elsa speak that I really like. So it kind of diagnoses what is going on with your accent and you can just like practice specific words for these things.

Shunyao: Any other questions you want to highlight again, scrolling past the chat right now.

Shunyao: What is more important to master, accent or grammar? I think grammar is even less important because, okay. Like I use this word and it was supposed to be past tense, I didn’t use past tense. Does it affect whether you understand it? You still understand it, right? Versus accent, if I say first and you thought I said fourth, that's actually leads to a misunderstanding. So I say whatever that's the most important thing is to making sure you deliver the message rather than just saying perfect English.

Shunyao: Awesome. Any other questions I know we’re a little bit over time. I can stay on, I'm also going to stop recording so that if you have questions that do not want to be on the record, that would be that'd be great. So let me stop recording right now.