Vanessa Van Edwards on Navigating the Virtual Workplace in Stressful Times

The world has dramatically changed in just a few weeks. As companies around the world shift to remote work, how do we navigate this crisis? Distributed host Matt Mullenweg talks to Vanessa Van Edwards, bestselling author, speaker, and founder of Science of People, about how we communicate with our friends, family, and coworkers during a time when Zoom and Slack are our primary tools for understanding each other.

To learn more about Vanessa’s work, visit scienceofpeople.com.

The full episode transcript is below.

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(Intro Music)

MATT MULLENWEG:  Howdy, everyone. Welcome back to the Distributed Podcast. This is our first episode since, well, everything has changed for our lives, for our family and friends and for the way we work. A lot of folks have been using Distributed.blog as a resource for remote work and best practices, so we wanted to do everything we can to help folks out in the weeks and months to come and look for lots of updates to the website that are already happening.

Today we are going to speak with Vanessa Van Edwards, an expert on public speaking who had to change the way she thought about her own work. And she also has some great tips for how we present ourselves in remote work as well. So without further ado, here is my chat with Vanessa.

Welcome, Vanessa Van Edwards.

VANESSA VAN EDWARDS:  Thank you so much for having me.

MATT:  I’m very excited. And also, thank you for..  you were one of our featured speakers at the Grand Meetup.

VANESSA:  [laughs]  Yes.

MATT:  So just to give some background to the listeners, once a year, Automattic would bring everyone together and we invite very few awesome speakers and Vanessa was one of them last year.

VANESSA:  It was such a lovely audience, too. I remember they actually gave me a standing ovation, which made me cry on stage.

MATT:  Well, thank you very much. And it was I think one of the earlier talks we had in the week so it ended up being fairly influential. Just to give a little bit of background for you though.. Now my understanding is you actually started off doing more online teaching?

VANESSA:  Yeah, I did. I actually stumbled into the online course arena before I even realized that was a thing. I was also on  YouTube back in 2007, if you can believe that, when people thought that YouTube was a joke and a fad.

And then online courses, I started my first online course in 2011-2012, and thank goodness, because at the time I was teaching a lot of engineers, programmers, accountants people skills. As you know, Matt, I like to joke, I’m a recovering awkward person. And so I was teaching soft skills in a very science-backed way. And so there was a platform called Udemy, where a lot of engineers were taking courses on programming and software, and so I thought well, let me put my “Charisma for Engineers” course on there and see what happens. And little did I know it would totally explode and change my life.

MATT:   Wow. So YouTube at the time was I guess pictures of dogs on skateboards. What were you putting on there at the time?

VANESSA:  [laughs]  Yes. You know what was really hot when I first got on there? Does anyone remember fingerboarding? Do you remember that craze?

MATT:  Ohh, miniature skateboards that you would do with your fingers?

VANESSA:  Yes! Yes, so I remember –

MATT:  Wow, I haven’t thought about that in a long time.

VANESSA: Okay, so I remember I was competing with fingerboarding videos. That was a thing that I was competing against. And in the beginning I was just doing very casual, on-my-phone communication tip