Episode Summary
We used to live in a world of trust, then verify. Today? It’s verify, then trust.
In an age of AI-generated content, social media, and endless misinformation, people are more skeptical than ever. So how do you earn someone’s trust when their default setting is doubt?
In this episode of Creating Superfans, Brittany welcomes back award-winning speaker and bestselling author Henna Pryor to celebrate the release of her new book, The Signal Gap: How to Boost Believability and Influence in the Age of Doubt.
Together, they explore:
- Why being credible isn’t always enough to be believed
- The invisible signals that can undermine even our best intentions
- How to close the gap between what you communicate and what people actually hear
- Why traditional tactics for building trust and influence may no longer work
- How AI is changing the meaning of personalization—and what it takes to stand out
- Why transparency and authenticity matter more than ever
Whether you’re leading a team, building a brand, or simply trying to communicate more effectively, this conversation will change the way you think about trust—and the signals you’re sending every day.
Get a FREE sneak peek of Henna’s new book! Read the first chapter of The Signal Gap and access exclusive bonuses here, or you can order it now on Amazon.
Connect with Henna Pryor:
More from Henna: Catch up on her first appearance on Creating Superfans, where she joined Brittany to discuss embracing awkwardness and her book Good Awkward.
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Transcription
Brittany Hodak: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Creating Superfans podcast. Today’s guest is someone I am lucky enough to call a dear friend, and someone who has a remarkable ability to make you rethink the way you show up in the world. Henna Pryor is an award-winning author, an expert in workplace performance and communication, and one of my very favorite keynote speakers.
Her first book, Good Awkward, taught us how to embrace discomfort as a catalyst for growth. And today, we are celebrating the release of her brand-new book, The Signal Gap: How to Boost Believability and Influence in the Age of Doubt. Oof, such a good title. In this episode, we talk about the invisible signals that we all send, why trust is harder to earn than ever before, and what you can do to become more believable, influential, and effective in every interaction you have.
. I’m a superfan of the new book and this conversation with Henna, and I know you will be too, so let’s dive in You may know her from the [00:01:00] gazillion award-winning, three-year-old, top 100 books of the year, Good Awkward. Uh, maybe you recognize her from Celebrity $100,000 Pyramid, or just maybe you know her because you follow her on socials and she is the best. Or maybe you listened to her OG episode of the Creating Superfans podcast.
If not, it’s linked below. The one, the only, the incredible, the incomparable, the amazing, the sometimes awkward but always in a good way, Hena Pryor. Welcome to the show, my friend.
Henna Pryor, CSP: intro I think I’ve ever had. You win. You win, Brittany. Superfan of the Brittany Hodak total ecosystem. Thank you for having me back
Brittany Hodak: Yay. Well, I’ve been so excited to have this conversation. I adore your book Good Awkward, and when you told me you were working on another book, I was like, “Already? Didn’t we just get Good Awkward? I feel like I’ve only read it two times.” But then you told me a little bit about your new book out today, The Signal Gap, [00:02:00] and I said, “Oh, that’s good.”
Like, is it possible I might enjoy this one even more than the last one? The bar is so high, I don’t know if you can do it, but Henna, you cleared the bar. This book is absolutely incredible. We will get all into it, but I wanna know, how did you get this idea? Like, you’ve spent years talking about embracing awkwardness, and, you know, what we can do to sort of be more human, and now you’ve got this message about something that feels so relevant right now in this crazy world of AI, and that’s sometimes people don’t believe us.
How did you realize this was the book you needed to write next, and how did that journey kind of play out?
Henna Pryor, CSP: Yeah. The, the relationship between the two isn’t always obvious to people, so I’ll give you, give you my, my one-line turn. Good Awkward was about learning how to embrace the very difficult but very common emotion most of us feel on the way to courage and confidence, right? We need to embrace awkwardness in order to raise our hand, to take the risk, [00:03:00] to try something new in business, to innovate, to create those superfans, right?
We need to get good at that. Let’s say gotten good at that. We are finally finding the courage to, to try some things, to have that conversation. We have that confidence. we need to understand that the environment we are speaking into has changed considerably. So what we are talking about in The Signal Gap is you found the courage to, you know, create a message, to share a message.
Now, is that message that you intend to send actually landing with an increasingly skeptical, you know, lack of trust, verifying everything audience? Is the message you’re trying to send the message that the audience actually receives? And that’s where we find ourselves creating a whole lot of signal gaps, and so we are gonna explore believability as a lever for influence
Brittany Hodak: And it’s so important because those signal gaps can happen everywhere. They happen online, they happen in real life, they happen with our close relationships, the casual relationships. [00:04:00] Talk a little bit, you used two words that are so important in the book in the explanation you just gave, which are trust and verification.
So talk a little bit about what you’ve uncovered here, kind of the big idea and the model behind this book, because again, I think this is an idea that’s relevant to everyone everywhere in the world we’re living in right now.
Henna Pryor, CSP: Yeah, small business, big business, it doesn’t matter. Most of us were trained on a phrase. If you work in sales leadership, if you own a company, if you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re a content creator, we were taught trust, then verify. Meaning humans generally, we trust each other until something smells a little bit off, maybe something seems a little bit fishy, our spidey senses have activated, then we would go verify.
Let’s go make sure this is what we think it is. paradigm has irreversibly shifted. have to like it, but you have to acknowledge it. We now live in verify, then trust. We verify first. I call it the verification [00:05:00] era. So how does this actually look in real life? Let’s talk about the simplest examples.
You know, before somebody goes on a date, they Google that person. If they didn’t, we would say, “Are you trying to be murdered?” Right? Like, you need to know something about this person before you go on a date, before you ingre- agree to engage with a product, a brand, a seller. We’re doing some searching. What does the internet have to say about this?
What does Reddit have to say? A lot of that happens before, but here’s the one that’s even crazier. Verification is now happening during. I could be on a Zoom call with somebody who’s trying to sell me something, convince me of something, and I’m quietly over here in AI or in Google. In four seconds, I can verify whether what you’re saying, what you’re claiming is correct.
And we are doing that in increasing measure because we are so cognitively overloaded. We don’t know what to trust anymore. It’s so much, you know, on the AI and the deepfakes and the scams. Did a person write this newsletter? Did a robot write it? Our brains are so exhausted from trying to figure it [00:06:00] out that whether we can name it or not, we’re relying both on that verification mechanism, we actually go verify, and then if we’re not sure about that result, we’re relying on something even deeper, which is our sense-making mechanism, and that’s rooted in patterns, in signals, things that we don’t even realize are happening.
So people just have to have this awareness that the world we lived in before is gone, and we need to make adjustments going forward.
Brittany Hodak: Yeah, and you know, you talk a lot about this sort of believability crisis, and I was just reading an article the other day, I, I can’t remember where I was reading it, uh, but it was talking about the rise of these zombie media companies
Henna Pryor, CSP: Mm-hmm
Brittany Hodak: buying all of these domains that used to be legit blogs or, uh, news outlets, and they’re cranking out literally tens of thousands of articles a day in some cases, and click farming.
And I recently had someone reach out to me on LinkedIn and said, “Hey, you don’t know me, but I follow your work, [00:07:00] and I wanted to make you aware of the fact that there is this, like, click farm zombie website using your name and byline on articles that are very much not written by you.” And so I then had to go and chase down and find who was doing this and say, you know, “Cease and desist right now, immediately.
Take all of this down.” And so as I was reading in the book about this believability gap and what’s happening, that was obviously very fresh in my mind because I’ve just lived through it. Of there are so many false signals being put out there, even if you’re not a content creator, even if you’re not somebody who’s sort of public-facing, this deficit of trust is, I think, ever-widening, ever-growing, and we’re all sort of having to, like, repent for the sins of others.
Like, we’ve got people who are coming in with this baggage that may have nothing to do with us, but it’s sort of like every country song where it’s like, you know, “What is the damage you had before you met me?” Like, what, [00:08:00] what happened? That’s sort of how people are showing up in not just sales situations, but you know, I have to decide, am I gonna trust you before I decide am I gonna like you?
Am I gonna listen to you? Am I gonna, you know, engage in whatever it is that you’re trying to, to talk to me about or sell me, et cetera? And it’s just a really wild new normal.
Henna Pryor, CSP: Yeah. I love what you said about this, uh, I don’t remember the exact phrase you used, but essentially this, this false proxy that a lot of these signals have created because let’s just say, Brittany, let, let’s use an example from our industry. Brittany and I are both, you know, we love our jobs as speakers, as authors. There are an abundance of top 10 speakers on X that now exist on the internet. wanna name names, but some of these lists were created by our colleagues. They literally bought a donai- domain, right? Top such and such speakers. They put themselves at the top of it, then they put a few other people on it, and they…
The reason they did this was for [00:09:00] discoverability. Now, some of these people have been found out. Here’s the thing. Brittany and I don’t do this. We would never do this. I know Brittany and I are friends outside of this conversation, so I know Brittany’s, you know, work ethic, and she knows mine. We would never do this. However, if Brittany and I now were to show up on a completely legitimate top list, because somebody might have a whisper that something like that can happen, that legitimate l- list is now slightly thrown into question. They’re like, “Well, is… But is that one real?” So it creates exactly that you said, a downstream ripple effect where we have to feel increasingly skeptical of everything, even the legitimate.
Just the existence of the fact that we could get burned means that we now check everything because we don’t want to get burned. It’s created a whole new operating system for people
Brittany Hodak: It absolutely has. And, you know, I think a really interesting dynamic of this is the [00:10:00] ages and sort of generations. And I’ve got, not to, like, point any fingers,
Henna Pryor, CSP: Sure
Brittany Hodak: but I’ve got, I’ve got a couple of aunts who will share, like, any AI-generated,
Henna Pryor, CSP: Mm-hmm.
Brittany Hodak: animal video, right?
Like, you know, maybe the duck really was skydiving, right?
Like, and they don’t care. They just see the cute animal video, and they share it. Uh, but then my, my boys, who are six and nine, are so skeptical, and the phrase they use all the time, as I’m sure your teenagers both, uh, do, too, is, “That’s AI.”
Henna Pryor, CSP: Ja
Brittany Hodak: then ironically enough, they will go to AI to verify whether or not this is a real Rottweiler and panther who happen to be living together in Siberia as friends, as one of my favorite Instagram follows happens to be, or AI-generated content.
And it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of dystopian when you think about it, that we’re using AI to verify whether or not stuff is AI. And in the book, you talk about the difference between believability and credibility and sort of the nuance there and what that means and how you can be one and not the other. Um, and again, I think this is something that maybe a [00:11:00] lot of people have not thought a ton about yet.
As always, you’re on the, on the cutting edge of, of the thought leadership here of this category. But I think it’s something that people are gonna spend more and more time thinking about, both on the receiving ends and the sending ends of those signals, because this gap is gonna continue to create all kinds of, you know, I don’t think it’s being too dramatic to say economic chaos.
Henna Pryor, CSP: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think s- so let’s make that distinction real quick. Credibility, when you think about credibility in the traditional terms, it’s things like, you know, your title, your expertise, uh, you know, if let’s say your brand, the, the awards you’ve won or the, the reputation you’ve built. Credibility still gets you in the room. not saying credibility doesn’t count for anything. Credibility 100% gets you in the room, believability is what decides whether you get to stay there. And we are not unfortunately, again, it pains me to say this, we are not in a second chances climate [00:12:00] anymore. So again, you know, we can talk about this from a thousand different ways, but let’s look at just the recent example, Ed Sheeran. You know, this is not about politics. I’m just gonna paint a very specific picture about timing. Ed Sheeran had, you know, a, a believability crisis recently with the whole thing about his opening act, and it… politics, whatever they may be, the problem is he did not respond himself. Maybe it was the PR p- people’s guidance, but he didn’t put out any sort of response to the issue for a full 14 days. So when we think about believability, that delay in a past life may have read as thoughtfulness. It may have read as legal is, you know, involved.
We have to wait until the PR team gives him the okay to say something. But in the world we live in now, where DoorDash tells us that our food will be here between 3:32 and 3:35, people do not have days of patience to decide that Ed has something to say about this. I understand if he can’t take a position right away, but he [00:13:00] needed to taste, ta– say something.
Now, were years of Ed Sheeran’s credibility destroyed? He’s still a brilliant musician, but was his believability amongst his fans, you know, taking a hit? It currently still is. He’s still trying to figure out how to get out of it, and it had more to do with those signals, the lack of saying anything, than it did with anything that he actually said
Brittany Hodak: 100%, and you know, one of the same, one of the things I say all the time is everyone is in the experience department, and every single person at your company is responsible for the perception of your brand, for the interactions that shape how people think about your brand. And one of, a, a very similar to the, you know, Ed Sheeran not saying anything, we– I think a lot of times people think like, “Oh, it’s a 24-hour news cycle,” like, “This is gonna pass.
People are gonna move on.” But I think we’ve seen the opposite, which is every hour you stay silent feels like an eternity, and people are going back to everything that you’ve done, questioning everything that you’ve said. And I saw this play out over the [00:14:00] summer with Buc-ee’s when John Oliver did a story about Buc-ee’s suing all of these small businesses for trademark infringement, and some of them were, like, wildly seen as, like, I don’t know, that’s a stretch.
And then the week after the show aired, they went after a small business in, I think it was Beaver Creek, Ohio, or Beaverton, Ohio, somewhere with beaver in the name. And Buc-ee’s said nothing, and this news story kept going, kept going, kept going. John Oliver talked about it for, like, three weeks in a row, four weeks in a row on the air, and there was literally no response at all.
And so what started happening was the world filled in the narrative, right? And they said, “Big, evil corporation bullying this small business.” And then when their CEO finally came out and said something, it was wildly off-key. Again, not to get political, but he said something to the effect of, “We’re gonna go in the conservative red states that appreciate us [00:15:00] instead of those liberal places that don’t want it.”
Like, it was so wi-wild,
Henna Pryor, CSP: Yeah
Brittany Hodak: and I, like a whole bunch of other people, was like, “Ooh, this kinda changes how I think of Buc-ee’s,” right?
Like,
thought it was, like, just this fun, very over-the-top, American, larger than life Texas whatever. And as those days went on and then turned into weeks, and then when they finally had a response, it was, like, wildly not something that, that, like, a PR expert had, had, you know, had any eyes on or any part of.
Clearly, I was like, “I don’t wanna wear any of my Buc-ee’s stuff anymore,” because the brand no longer meant what I had told myself it meant. And that is the gap, right? Between what is the message that you’re perhaps trying to send out into the world and what is being not just received by the public, but then, like, redisseminated and shared, right?
Like, the reputation, like the who we say we are versus [00:16:00] what the world says we are, and that is the heart of what this book is all about, of why that’s a huge problem
Henna Pryor, CSP: Mm-hmm.
Brittany Hodak: you can do to close that gap.
Henna Pryor, CSP: Yeah, I love everything you said, and specifically, there was one thing that stood out. You said, you know, early on that it used to be that certain things would last, you know, twenty-four hours in the news cycle, and we say it would pass. Today, the… You know, back in the… Look, I was born in the early eighties.
It used to be that something lived in the news cycle, and then unless the news cycle kept talking about it, it would pass. They were onto the next thing. That was pre-streaming. That was pre-Internet. Today, everything lives in a permanent, frozen, searchable record. So not only can the news linger longer, we can take screenshots. We can
Brittany Hodak: Ja
Henna Pryor, CSP: you know, find proof. And so again, this is where politics aside, you know, when Ed Sheeran tried to take a s- a stance of, you know, “I don’t like to bring politics to the stage,” and then everyone picked up their screenshots that said, “Remember when you talked about Ukraine? Remember when you talked about Brexit?” So [00:17:00] then what happens is outside of it being, you know, feeling like a lie, what he dealt with was, in the book I talk about layers of congruence, he really created a fracture in character congruence. You are saying, you are claiming publicly that you are X, and yet your micro signals, your micro claims that you have made over time, our brains are pattern recognition machines, even if we barely remember you saying it, oh, we remember when push comes to shove. And B, even if we don’t remember it clearly, it doesn’t take more than two seconds and a phone to go find it, and these things become very difficult to recover from. What… You know, unfortunately, we are in cancel culture. We are in all these things. I’m not saying that’s right, wrong or indifferent, but it breaks my heart that these things are preventable just by being a little more conscious of some of these areas where gaps occur
Brittany Hodak: Absolutely. And I, let’s talk about that congruence. Let’s talk about some of the gaps because, I mean, there’s so many incredible frameworks that you introduce, so much fun. By the way, this is also a very, if anybody didn’t know [00:18:00] how much Hena loves, like, old school hip hop, you will absolutely know after you read this book, which I adore.
I know. Hena, do you wanna maybe take this moment to, like, humble brag about perhaps your, your greatest accomplishment in life that you shared recently on the internet? Do you,
Henna Pryor, CSP: that
Brittany Hodak: follower?
Henna Pryor, CSP: that on, on LinkedIn, it said people who follow Hena Briar also follow Snoop Dogg. I about fell out of my chair. I said, “There’s, there is no award or trophy or bestseller list that will compare to this moment of knowing that we sit in the same category.” Snoop,
Brittany Hodak: You may also want to follow. Yes, incredible.
Henna Pryor, CSP: perfect.
Brittany Hodak: okay, so let’s talk, let’s talk about those, uh, those layers or levels of congruence
Henna Pryor, CSP: Yeah, okay. So here’s, here’s… I think as we go through the four, I want people to know this. When you first hear them, they are going to seem like prevailing wisdom, and to some small degree they are, but they now have an outsized math of breaking them. So there are four layers of congruence to, you know, just to kind of lead into [00:19:00] this.
Clarity is now table stakes. Confidence in your messaging is now table stakes. Competence, being able to do what you say you’re gonna do, table stakes. All of those things are an expectation. You are not gonna create a fan, let alone a superfan, without having all of those three things. But now, with us being so bombarded by stimulus and not knowing what to believe, the things that our brain are also scanning for are congruence.
And so I break these down across four layers. Congruence as a definition simply means that what you say, you do, and what you mean to say, the intention and the truth of the, the actual matter underneath of it are all pointing in the same direction, and it’s a little less simple than it sounds. So number one is communication congruence. Communication congruence asks the question, do your words actually deliver what you mean, or does something else, either your tone or some hedging or your filler, [00:20:00] sneak a different message in? You’re not lying. There’s something that’s being snuck in, so that’s communication. The second one is belief congruence.
Did you walk them through your reasoning, did you just hand them a conclusion and hope that they trust it? People are not willing to have a handed conclusion and a trust me anymore. Spoiler alert. Number three is contextual congruence. Contextual asks, does your signal still land when it travels to a room that you didn’t intend it for, where no one knows the full context of your message and no one owes you the benefit of the doubt, right?
Does it still hold? And then number four is character congruence is does the version of you that you curate, keyword curate, and we all do it, and broadcast hold up when somebody meets you on a regular Tuesday afternoon? four are way sneakier than we realize, and most of us, the most high intent, high achievers ourselves with significant gaps in those spaces without even realizing it
Brittany Hodak: So [00:21:00] how can we realize it and how can we audit that gap if we wanna look at our own signal integrity to correct some of these issues before they become, you know, hugely disproportionately impactful in our lives in a negative way?
Henna Pryor, CSP: Yeah, I think, you know, the, the– let’s just take one at a time. Let’s take, uh… I, I talk about communication a lot, so today, I wanna talk about the belief congruence, right? This idea of, you know, do they know the full reasoning that walked you there? I wanna just honor that there was a period of time where leaders across industries or business owners, when something went a bit, you know, sideways, or we were trying to present a new idea, we were told, you know, “Present this idea with confidence.
Be unflappable. Be, you know, a hundred percent firm in your conviction. If you have that f– you know, firmness in your choice and your conviction, people will just follow you. They’ll get on board. They’ll inspire followership.” Those days are not anymore. We are much less likely, as a current population, to just take somebody’s word as, “Trust me, this is what you want. [00:22:00] Trust me, this is good for you.” We’re like, but why? How– Can you please t– you know, tell me how you got there?” So I open that chapter with an example of a VP of sales who is trying to roll out a new commission plan to his team, right? And he’s like, “Okay, these guys are gonna be excited. We’re gonna do something that’s really gonna move and shake things up.
You know, if people do well, they’re gonna make more money.” But of course, it is 2026, so what does this sales team immediately do following the call? They take that new commission plan, they run it into AI, they say, “Who’s gonna make more money? Who’s gonna make less money?” They find out that the middle population is all basically taking a fifteen percent pay cut. The top producers, they’re gonna do great. The bottom producers, unscathed, same, same. The whole middle population, fifteen percent pay cut. Now, is there potential that they can do great under this new plan? Yes. Was the VP of sales lying? Absolutely not. But they did not show the path that was taken [00:23:00] to get to this new commission plan.
They didn’t talk about what they weighed, what they discarded. They didn’t talk about the fact that for some people, this would temporarily look like a pay cut. So because they didn’t talk about all of that and just said, “Hey, this is gonna be great. Trust us,” it looked like an omission. It looked like lying, and within two seconds, they had a spreadsheet called What Leadership Didn’t Want To Tell You, and it was flying in the group chat. This is the moment in time we live in. And so again, brands, leaders, we all have this obligation to understand that, you know, blank belief and trust me, it doesn’t work the way it used to, and if you don’t address the questions people are now going to ask, you will create a signal gap for yourself, no matter how good it is on paper.
Brittany Hodak: Yes, and, you know, as I was reading that part of the book, I was reminded of… So there’s a book, in full disclosure, I’ve not like read this entire second book that I’m about to mention, but, um, one of my, one of my kids’ doctors had brought it up at one point. The book is called Good Inside. It’s very famous.
There’s this author, Dr. Becky… [00:24:00] Yeah, Dr. Becky somebody. I don’t know her last name. Um, and I, I didn’t finish the book, just but that’s like ADHD, not like any indictment on the book. It’s a parenting book. Um, and she talks about this idea of what she calls MGI, which is what’s the most generous interpretation that I can have of whatever just happened, right?
So like, how can I give people grace? How can I err on the side of like, you know, the like just what is the most generous interpretation of this moment? And what struck me, uh, you know, and I remember in the book being like, “Oh, that’s really nice. Like, I should work on that. I should in my own life
Henna Pryor, CSP: Mm-hmm.
Brittany Hodak: look for the most generous interpretation all the time instead of the like where, where, where is the like, you know, fire, dumpster fire that my brain goes of like this happened or that happened.”
But in reading your book, what became so apparent to me is that we have all been trained, whether it’s, you know, the algorithms or the dopamine or whatever, to not look for the most generous interpretation. Instead, we are doing the opposite, which is [00:25:00] are you… So like I remember, uh, early, early on when I was in New York, I…
It was before I lived in New York. I was interning there, and I got scammed by one of those people that would like stand in Union Square and be like, “Oh, we’re gonna sell you like this… You know, there’s like this salon, and they’re gonna like give, you know, color your hair and dye your hair and do a blow, and it’s gonna be amazing and all these services, and this is like $1,000 worth of services.
And, you know, you can get it today for $100 ’cause we’re looking for, you know, however many people,” or like whatever it was. And it obviously it was like a complete scam, total, total disaster. Um, but because of that, I was like, “I am never gonna trust a street vendor again.” Like, you could be a Girl Scout, you could be whatever, I am like, “You are gonna scam me,” because my lived experience taught me this is a scam.
And Throughout the book, when we talk about this shift to verify then trust, and how much believability is suffering right now, I think [00:26:00] it is because collectively we all feel like we have been scammed. We have been conned. There are so many examples, first-hand examples, and examples that we all, like, have heard about from people we love and trust or the media, and I was just thinking throughout the book of why this is so very important and sort of aligns with that.
It would be great if everyone had the most generous interpretation, but we have to now assume to be successful that people are going to have the least generous
Henna Pryor, CSP: Угу
Brittany Hodak: and that, I think, is what we have to plan for. And everything else you said before is, like, it’s table stakes. Like, we have to meet this level of, um, verability?
I, I don’t even know what, what is the word of, like, what we have to be able to, to, to, to show up with to earn the right for someone
Henna Pryor, CSP: Ah,
Brittany Hodak: to take what we’re saying into account
Henna Pryor, CSP: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s verifiability, I think is
Brittany Hodak: Verifiability. Thank you.
Yes
Henna Pryor, CSP: I often say instead of just being compelling, now need to be confirmable.[00:27:00]
Brittany Hodak: Yes
Henna Pryor, CSP: You now need to be able to have somebody, anybody be able to validate and verify the claim that you’re making. So I wish we were all giving the most generous interpretation, and I say this squarely in the book, generosity expensive. It requires us to do some mental gymnastics to be like, “Is this what this person meant by that? Maybe they were having a bad day. Maybe they just rushed and got at this email.” That requires a lot of mental lift on our part to find the generous interpretation. As a mother of teenagers, I will do that work with my teenagers. I am less inclined to do all that mental work with a, you know, potential seller that I don’t know yet. It is much easier cognitively to be suspicious. Generosity is expensive. Suspicion is free. Su- suspicion is also safer. keeps us from getting bamboozled. So [00:28:00] suspicion as a default state is actually just our, you know, very subconscious, sometimes conscious, but subconscious protective mechanism going, “I don’t need– want to be the one who gets bamboozled.”
And so we do, you know, what you did. And here’s the other interesting rub about your experience on the street is it used to be, okay, Brittany had this experience on the street, now she’s probably gonna be really careful about going to a salon that’s offering that much of a deep promo. Of course, that makes sense. But now the internet is interneting. Reddit has that exact same story. That never happened to me, Brittany, but if I read that on Reddit or if I heard you say it, and all of a sudden I was offered a deal at an up-and-coming salon that’s trying to get their name out, I have no real personal reason to be skeptical. But we accept certain corners of the internet as truth. It’s actually a very
Brittany Hodak: Yeah
Henna Pryor, CSP: thing I talk about in the book. We have super low levels of trust in institutions, in corporate and government. We don’t– You know, trust is at an all-time low for those [00:29:00] institutions. But if it’s, like, somebody on the internet like us, TikToker that we follow, we’re like, “Oh, they’re telling the truth.” We,
Brittany Hodak: But I think that is eroding so fast too because of like those zombie websites. The story that I was saying before, the fastest growth in those AI-generated, um, news stories and articles is fake first-person experiences where the AI is writing in that like very
Henna Pryor, CSP: Yeah
Brittany Hodak: trustworthy like, “I am a grandma, let me tell you what I learned about gardening,” or, you know, “Here’s what happened to me with my kids,” because that historically has been such a high, um, trust signal when you’re like, “Oh, well I’m re- I’m reading from this
Henna Pryor, CSP: right?
Brittany Hodak: personal story from a reporter or somebody who, you know, 10 years ago we could, we could say they likely have journalistic integrity and I can trust this because it is a verified source
Henna Pryor, CSP: Yeah, it’s, it’s so the, the term is cheap signals versus [00:30:00] costly signals. It used to be that a personal story was a costly signal. It required us to share an experience that felt authentic to us with a level of detail. But now it is not very hard to fabricate a story of that nature with the help of AI, right?
So certain things, and again, this is evolving by the day, that used to be a costly signal. For example, a personalized thank you letter to a client. You know, personalized I’m using in quotes because the old ways of personalization of I did research on the customer, I included some, you know, details. If it is now something that is scrapeable by AI and that is your standard for personalization, signal.
My 14-year-old could do that in four seconds with his phone. You know, a personalized, you know, costly signal thank you letter is, “My God, Brittany, last time we talked, you told me about this, you know, with your kid. How’s he doing?” Um, you know, putting that in the note or, you know, “When we were on our video conference, I noticed that beautiful piece of art.
Do you still have that back there?” Those are the things that AI [00:31:00] struggles to scrape. So the definition of costly signal continues to evolve, and the cheap signals continue to cheapen. It just, you have to keep your eye on the ball, and that requires some effort
Brittany Hodak: I cosign on this 1,000%. I just saw a video on, like, Instagram of one, somebody selling, like, an AI course I think probably,
Henna Pryor, CSP: Mm-hmm
Brittany Hodak: and it was one of those, like, autoplay. Like, I wasn’t trying to watch it, and then I, like, rage watched the whole thing, where she was talking about whatever skill that she’d built, and she was like, “I know my prospects better than they know themselves.
I know more about them than they do because I’ve bought the data and I’ve done this, and I’ve, you know,
written written the skills,” and blah, blah, blah. And I think, I mean, first of all, I think that’s, like, icky and skeezy. Also, I think there is a whole subset of people that do not understand that humans are not comprised of ones and zeros.
And for the people who think like, “Oh, I know what you’re gonna do, I’ve, I, you know, I, I will put predictive analytics ahead of human experience,” like, I, I think the real [00:32:00] opportunity, and you talk about this a little bit in the book, is for the people who recognize this now, go buy Stick With That in stores today.
For the people who read this book, for the people who recognize this, for the people who, I don’t wanna say overcorrect, ’cause it’s kind of just like a return to, like, what has always been true, and you talk about that a little bit in the book too, of technology has, has exploded this as a phenomenon, but this is, none of this is new, right?
It’s like everything else in the human experience. These, we’ve, we’ve lived through versions of this before. The people who understand this and adapt to this moment in time are going to not see incremental return, they’re gonna see exponential returns, because it really does feel like we are getting close to a tipping point, and pretty soon people are gonna be like, “Enough is enough,” and hard unsubscribe from all of the, like, an algorithm did it, all of the things that used to be costly and are now cheap as those, as those signals.
Henna Pryor, CSP: Yeah, it’s really… So the part that I really, I felt tickled by, and I f- I feel like I’m [00:33:00] gonna shamelessly plug here, I got to interview some of the top thinkers on influence and trust for this book. You know, I
Brittany Hodak: Pl- I was just about to ask, so pl- I was gonna say you are one of the smartest people that I know, but you did not just use your experience and your research. You brought in so many experts. So please brag, please list them, because I wanted to make sure we drop this. There, there’s so many incredible thinkers in this book
Henna Pryor, CSP: You know, I reached out to the likes of Adam Grant, Seth Godin, um, you know, Daniel Pink, Robert Cialdini, uh, y- Tasha Eurich, Dorie Clark, Michael Bungay Stanier, and people who have studied influence and trust deeply, and I kind of came at them with this idea of you’ve ever taught and written about is correct, and in my opinion, partially now incomplete because things have changed so much. And what really just, you know, warmed my heart is they’re like, “You’re right. Because the world has changed so significantly, so a lot of what is taught in the book is [00:34:00] that used to work in the influence and trust space, many of them still do to a point, but a lot of the stuff we now need to do to get ahead, to break away from the pack, is going to feel counterintuitive.
For example, you know, everybody will teach you lead from your company’s strengths, lead from your brand’s strengths, lead from your strengths. Well, if you were to go into AI, it will tell you the strengths first. So the person who is now breaking through the noise is actually the person who doesn’t do that, is the person who says, “You know, Brittany, I’m gonna get on your podcast.
I’m not gonna lie, I, I do not feel completely equipped to, you know, beautifully connect this to superfans, but I’m gonna do my best, and here’s where I think I could still add value anyway.” That, to people now, is refreshing. You’re like, “Oh, well, she’s telling me the truth up front, so she’s probably not gonna BS me later on either.” Right? It helps lower that wall early. So, like, leading with the con, leading with the drawback, these are techniques that, you know, while they’ve always existed in some small capacity, now are moved up to the [00:35:00] top. Most sales teams haven’t caught up. Most leadership teams haven’t caught up. There’s a lot of opportunity for us to rewrite some processes based on the times we live in now and not the ones that we wish we lived in from five to 10 years ago.
Brittany Hodak: Huh, ugh, I love this. Okay, I don’t wanna make you pick a favorite because there are so many incredible insights in this book, so many great interviews. But just share one or two things that as you were working on this, as you were talking to some of these incredible thought leaders in the field, that you just, you know, made you so happy to be able to, to share with the world
Henna Pryor, CSP: Yeah, one of my favorites actually, uh, Adam Grant taught it to me as we were talking through the ideas of the book. It’s called The Knowledge Persuasion Model, which is once something becomes known and understood as a tactic or a technique, start to immediately become doubtful of it, right? It starts to feel like a tactic and a technique.
So, uh, I used, um, an example that I don’t think this ever made it into the book, but I, in my mind, I always think of Chris Voss’ mirroring. You know, he’s the, the [00:36:00] FBI hostage negotiator, and he teaches a technique called mirroring. And if you do mirroring correctly, it’s a technique deeply rooted in empathy. So the simple version of it sounds like, um, if I were to say, you know, “It’s really, really expensive,” then Brittany would say back to me, “Expensive?” And then I would respond, right? That’s kind of how the technique works. it became very ubiquitous. People just wanted to use mirroring without the technique that underlies it, the deep empathy.
So now, if people do that to me, like, “What are you trying to Chris Voss me right now?” Right? Because it, it became known as a technique. When everything starts to feel like it’s being used as a technique or as a measure or as a metric, our, our bodies automatically put up a resistance to it. So the, you know, some of those interesting research studies like that I found fascinating because we’re doing these things thinking they’re still working, we’re wise to it now, and we need to adjust and change course.
Brittany Hodak: I love it. It’s like the people who love the band until the band gets popular, and then [00:37:00] they hate everybody who likes the band. And they’re like, “Well, you weren’t here for the first album,” or, “You didn’t see this tour.” Um, Hina, I could talk to you all day and all night, and I probably will, but we’ll do it, we’ll do it, uh, via voice notes in our text.
As we wrap up this episode, where can people go to learn more, find more about this incredible new book that you have given us?
Henna Pryor, CSP: Oh, I’m so grateful for the time. Uh, thesignalgap.com has lots of information about the book. It’s available everywhere books are sold. Uh, I am Henna Pryor, H-E-N-N-A-P-R-Y-O-R. LinkedIn and Instagram are my primary playgrounds. And what I will say is this, is if you are a fan of Brittany’s and creating funny, I was thinking about this before we got on. It– The Signal Gap is really the inverse, the opposite of everything you teach, kind of like the watch outs and the other side. So if you’re doing all the beautiful things that Brittany has taught you over the years about how to create I want you to be equally as passionate [00:38:00] building awareness of the watch outs, because it is a sin to do all of this big, beautiful work and then have somebody not believe you because of something small that you don’t even realize that you’re doing.
So they’re very complementary to one another, and I’m just so grateful to learn from you and be in your orbit all the time.
Brittany Hodak: Yeah, I was gonna say, just to clarify, not the opposite meaning it’s gonna teach you something different, the this is everything that you need to know. And,
Henna Pryor, CSP: complimentary
Brittany Hodak: knows this. We, we have been so fortunate to share a ton of clients back and forth.
Henna Pryor, CSP: Mm-hmm.
Brittany Hodak: so picky about who I will recommend as a keynote speaker because I wanna make sure it’s somebody incredible.
And any time I’m asked for a recommendation, I always say if you want somebody who’s a similar vibe but totally different message, get Henna. If you liked me, you’ll love Henna. Uh, that is true of the book, that’s true of the keynote because as you said, it’s sort of a totally different lens and look on something that is so incredibly important for what we’re both talking about, which is how to have your message, your platform, um, your, your [00:39:00] company grow because people love you, trust you, and wanna tell their friends about you
Henna Pryor, CSP: Yep. Same, same, goal, two sides of the coin
Brittany Hodak: Yes. Well, Hena, thank you so much for coming on the show. I always love a chance to sit down with you, and I mean it when I say the bar was so high with Good Awkward. It is one of the very first best books I have ever read by an author. It’s… It came out… And I, I remember, I remember I got the advance and I called Hena, and I was like, “I am so jealous in the best way ’cause I’m proud of you as a friend” But there’s so much stuff in here that’s so good.
Since your book came out just a few months before m- or after mine, and now your second book is way ahead of my second book. But it is so incredible good, and so incredibly good. You absolutely cleared the very high bar. So everybody go check out The Signal Gap. I promise you, you will love it. And if you don’t already follow Hena, make sure you follow her because she is one of my favorite people, one of the smartest people that you will ever see on the internet, and hopefully have the pleasure to meet in real life, too.
And her signals are 100% in integrity with each other. She’s exactly the [00:40:00] same person as you expect her to be
Henna Pryor, CSP: I appreciate you so much. So much fun
Brittany Hodak: Hey friends, one more quick note. Henna has been generous enough to give you the first chapter of The Signal Gap completely for free. All you have to do is go to thesignalgap.com/superfans linked in the show notes to get the first chapter, plus some other really fun bonuses that I’m not gonna spoil for you.
Believe me, you are gonna wanna check it out. Robert Cialdini said this is both a page-turner and a game-changer. He’s 100% spot on. thesignalgap.com/superfans
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