We were lucky to catch up with Elaine Lin Hering recently and have shared our conversation below.

Elaine, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

My mission is to help support rather silence people. Having spent more than a decade teaching negotiation skills and frameworks founded out of the Harvard Negotiation project, I realized that despite the quality of those frameworks, some people still didn’t negotiate, have difficult conversations, or give and receive feedback. Why was that? Because we’ve all learned and benefited from staying silent. And regardless of how well-intentioned we are as leaders, we continue to silence the very people we aim and claim to support.

Silence means that we become shells of who we could be. We doubt ourselves instead of recognizing the impact of the systems and people around us. We collectively miss out on the innovations, ideas, and fullness of life that could be — for each of us. So having spent many years silenced, my mission is to make sure that people like me feel seen, known, and heard. And that we collectively create spaces and places where everyone can flourish.

Elaine, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My mom always said that I would make a living using my mouth. And she was right.

I went to Harvard Law School intending to be a litigator. Instead of practicing law, I found the world of corporate communication and conflict management. As I taught frameworks for negotiation and handling difficult conversations, I found the absence of silence and differences of power from those conversations wholly unsatisfying, and often, irresponsible. So I set out to fill that gap.

My best intention in pushing that conversation forward is my forthcoming book Unlearning Silence: How to Speak Your Mind, Unleash Talent, and Live More Fully (Penguin 2024).

Today, I do keynotes, facilitate workshops, and write on the topic of silence. Because the reality is that we each have a voice and it is to our collective benefit to be able to use them. So I help clients whose teams struggle with cross-functional collaboration, turf wars, and where everything (painfully) seems to happen in the meeting after the meeting. Instead of doling out the common advice “speak up”, I solve for the underlying reason that expressing and engaging with differences is hard — the silence we’ve learned, benefited from, and continue to perpetuate.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I resisted social media. I was told by my business partners at the time that if my content was good enough, I didn’t need to be on social media. I regret listening to their outdated and limiting advice. Life lesson: interrogate the advice that people give you to see if it makes sense for yourself and your situation, even when you trust them.

After I sold my book to Penguin, their Author Development Team rightly nudged me to start posting on LinkedIn — just once a week for six weeks, they said. It was the perfect experiment to see whether I hated social media because I actually hated social media, or if I hated it because it was new to me.

I hated it only because it was new to me. Being on LinkedIn has been transformative for me. It has been a balm for the isolation I often felt as the first and only of my gender, ethnicity, age, and immigration status in the worlds that I was in. It was empowering to find and be able to be in community with other people who care about the the things I do. It was affirming to see that the thoughts I thought might only have value to me resonated with people around the world.

I’m very much still in the process of building my audience (so please join me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elainelinhering/. But my advice of anyone getting started is to build a small finite experiment for yourself. Whether 3 weeks or 6 weeks. Whether once a week or 4 times a week. Dip your toe in and experiment. See what you learn. Because my bet is that you will find a rhythm with social media that broadens your perspective and enriches your life.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

Surprisingly, it is my humanity that has helped differentiate me in the market. There are lots of thought leaders and “experts”. There are academics who are heady and theoretical. There are practitioners who are strategic and looking to add value. And early in my career I thought I had to be like all of them in order to have credibility.

What surprised me is that being human — talking about the challenges we navigate as leaders, parents, spouses, caregivers, and humans, and engaging with empathy and emotion — has both helped me live in a way that I want and draw people to me. There is something about “getting it” because at the end of the day, we are all human.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.elainelinhering.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elainelinhering/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elainelinhering/
• Newsletter: https://hello.elainelinhering.com/newsletter

Image Credits
Cat Coppenrath