credit to Sixteen Miles Out
Christina Butler spent two weeks sitting two or three rows behind Jerry Sandusky.
Every single day of that trial. Every witness, every cross-examination, start to finish. Hundreds of reporters covered the case. She's the only reporter who was there for all of it.
Christina spent twenty years as a TV reporter and anchor before she became a professional speaker. Now she teaches the idea of clear, concise, and confident communication to organizations who need their people to say the hard thing without falling apart on the way there. She's lived the version of "hard thing" most of us will never have to; things like cameras catching fire mid-broadcast, riots, and a school shooting unfolding live. So when I had her on the podcast and asked what two weeks of Sandusky testimony does to a person, I expected her to say something about endurance or “being a professional and pushing through it.”
Instead, she offered different advice: Turn the camera around.
"That's when you turn around and you take a look at the family members," she said. "How are they handling things? What habits are they showing? What tics do they have? How much are they conferring with their attorney?" During the same testimony everyone else found grinding, she was watching a completely different room.
I asked her because I assumed the courtroom would be unbearably boring. Turns out it wasn't boring at all; I was just looking at the wrong thing.
D - Dig Deeper
My book is built around the YES AND Framework: Yield to what is, Explore and express your core, Start small, Access your creative genius, Notice and nurture emotions, Dig deeper. People hear "dig deeper" and assume it's the reflective one, the closing thought, something you do once the real work is finished.
Christina's courtroom answer is the clearest example I've come across of what it actually does.
Digging deeper isn't a wrap-up step. It's the thing that keeps the real work possible once things have gone flat. Christina didn't survive weeks of testimony through sheer discipline. She survived it by refusing to let her attention sit still. Every time the front of the room stopped giving her something new, she found a new question and pointed herself at it.
That's a fantastic mechanism for dealing with apathy too. Apathy, not resistance, is the actual problem in most change efforts I get hired to fix. Resistance is loud. You can see it, argue with it, manage it directly. Apathy is the much bigger and much quieter problem, it's most of your team nodding in the all-hands and changing nothing about how they work the next morning. Nobody's fighting you. They've just stopped watching.
You cannot lecture someone out of apathy. I've watched leaders try with better slides, more logic, and the same message said slower and louder. It doesn't move the room, because the room already heard it the first time. What moves the room is the same thing that kept Christina present for weeks of testimony nobody else could sit through: Somebody actually getting curious about what's happening underneath the surface, instead of just re-explaining the surface.
Three ways to use this, starting this week
If you're an individual feeling stuck or bored: Don't try to push through it. Turn around. Pick the thing in front of you that's gone flat - a project, a meeting, a conversation - and ask one question you don't already know the answer to about the people in the room rather than the task on the table. Christina's version: What's that person actually doing with their hands right now, and what does it tell me? Yours can be smaller. It just has to be a real question, not a rhetorical one.
If you're leading a team through change and getting nodding instead of energy: Stop checking whether they understood the message. They probably did. Ask what they're not saying. In a team meeting this week, instead of explaining the change again, ask each person one specific question about how it's actually landing for them. Not whether they're on board, but what it looks like day-to-day now. You're listening for the tic, the deflection, the thing underneath the nod.
If you're stuck on a decision and circling the same two options: Turn the camera around. Ask who's affected by this decision that hasn't said anything yet, and go find out what they see that you don't. The answer is rarely in the data you're already holding.
None of these require more time. They require pointing your attention somewhere you weren't already pointing it.
Where to go from here
Christina and I covered a lot more in the full conversation than what's here; things like her exit moment from news during the Baltimore riots, what it took to anchor through the Virginia Tech shooting without breaking down on air, and the genuinely funny problem of her own kids using her communication frameworks against her at the dinner table. It's worth a listen, especially if you've ever sat in a meeting that seemed fine on the surface but you couldn't explain why it didn't feel right.
Listen to the full episode here.
And if the apathy problem is the one you're actually living with right now - tired people, good intentions, nobody pushing back but nobody buzzing either - that's the exact gap the YES AND framework was built to close. If you want to go deeper on what that looks like for your team, you can reach me here.
P.S. Everything in this article assumes you already know what's underneath the apathy on your team. Most leaders don't, at least not specifically. That's exactly what a YES AND Gameplan call is for.
It's a one-on-one diagnostic conversation where we turn the camera around on your actual situation, not a hypothetical one, and you walk out with a clear picture of where the apathy is really coming from and what would move it. No pitch, no deck. Just the dig-deeper conversation most leaders never get to have about their own team.
Get more info and sign up to get your own customized YES AND Gameplan here