We didn’t expect this. You might not have either. Turns out, trust is resonating. Our last two episodes both landed in the Top 5% of downloads of all podcasts worldwide. Before we move forward, let’s sit with this.
Hi everybody and hi to our new listeners. Our last two episodes made quite a splash so we’ve got a bigger audience now, and I want to welcome you. Those two episodes were about trust, so I thought this would be a good chance to kind of process a little bit of this good news and also talk about what it has to do with trust.
Hi everybody. This is 10 minutes to better patient communication from health communication partners. Since 2017 we’ve been giving you inspiration and strategies to improve engagement, experience, and satisfaction. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, a researcher, consultant, and educator specializing in communication and education. This podcast digs into what we often take for granted about communication in our professional lives, especially in health care and public health, and increasingly across sectors. Because communication touches everything. If you want to strengthen the impact you have in your professional sphere, this is a place for you. We’re here to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, make the difference we got into this work to make. If you’re looking for ways to deepen the impact of your communication at work, I’d love to connect. Visit h-cpartners .com and hit contact. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay inspired and reach out anytime on LinkedIn to explore how we might work together.
So yes, our two prior episodes were an interview with Dr. Renata Schiavo from Columbia University about the science of trust (Part 1, Part 2). And they both landed in the top 5 % of all podcasts worldwide, based on download numbers, and especially how quickly the downloads happen. I have the industry benchmarks that we’re using to measure this by. I’ll throw that in the show notes (here and here).
But this was kind of amazing to me because it’s not just the top 5 % of health podcasts or the top 5 % even of social science podcasts, but of all podcasts all around the world. And it turns out we had a global reach, too. We’re being listened to in at least 25 different countries. So again, welcome and if you are coming to this show in a language other than English, I would love to hear from you. I would love to hear your story, where you’re listening, how you’re encountering the show. Are you using a translator? I am all excited to hear about your experience with the show in a language other than English, so please do be in touch. And really the easiest way to do that is to visit healthcommunicationpartners .com and click on the contact button because it generates an email that comes to me, but you can also connect with me on LinkedIn.
So I want to thank you for everyone who’s been here all along. I guess this is a cool club! I always thought of it in my head as like a blanket fort for word nerds. But we’re gonna need more blankets now, clearly. And I’ve been cycling through a lot of emotions over the last, I guess, like 10 days as I’ve been sitting with this data. But I’m holding tight to gratitude. And I also, I take your trust seriously. I’d like to think I’m in tune with the kind of responsibility that you’ve given me to hold this space well, this space that we’ve made together. So, especially with the reminder of the global reach of the show, I want to be more mindful in the ways that I tend to still be very US -centric or like exclusively US -centric so I’m going to try to have a better global mindset myself.
I thought we could take this episode to kind of pause and consider: trust, huh? I am wondering what you think might have made these episodes so popular. You know, why did this interview with Dr. Schiavo strike the chord that it did. What was it about her talking, her choice of topic, this kind of geopolitical moment? What do you think it was that really struck a chord? What struck a chord in you?
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And please be in touch, please let me know. I genuinely want to hear what you have to say about this. I have been thinking about it myself and I have some questions about trust that I’ve kind of been marinating in since I’ve listened to our episode and since I’ve had a chance to reflect on what Dr. Schiavo and I were talking about to prepare for the episode.
She’s invited all of us to measure trust in our projects. And I wonder, are we willing to do that? What does it mean to measure our own trustworthiness? Because I think both she and I share the the conviction that we need to look internally to do this work. It can’t just be we’re measuring how much they trust us, but how much are we trustworthy? What are we doing to be trustworthy?
And that can take us places, right? We’re bound to turn up some difficult realities. And how willing are we to go to places that these kinds of questions are going to take us?
And this is also why it’s so important to have a community when you are doing this kind of work. Don’t try this alone. Have friends, colleagues, spaces like this where you can process the kind of things that this is going to turn up. Because it will, when you’re starting to ask pointed questions.
Another kind of tension that has emerged for me when I think about a focus on trust and trustworthiness is to do this work without patting ourselves too hard on the back for doing so, right? Not to get too self-congratulatory, but instead to get ready for what we might see when we ask these questions. And keeping thinking critically about the power dynamics at play. Because the way that trust is named and measured and defined is a power move. So inviting communities to lead us and to educate us is essential to this work. And hopefully if we’re lucky, they will say yes.
So just prior to this three episode kind of arc on trust and trustworthiness–we had the two part episode from Dr. Schiavo, and then I had done an episode prior to that. But before that, we had a three episode arc on tech. We did an episode on peer feedback in a software company, on chat GPT prompts, and then from Dr. Ayo Olagoke on using AI and health communication. So I thought, “Well, what does this have to do with trust?” Can we draw the thread through those episodes that came before it? What do we have there, when it comes to power and involving people, involving communities, involving users?
I wonder what you see when you think about AI and chat GPT and power, or AI and chat GPT and our responsibility to involve other people. Because you want to acknowledge: these are useful tools, and they’re here, and they’re powerful, and everyone can use them. Patients and the public. So there’s this kind of democratizing potential.
I wonder: are you using these tools? How are you using them? What do you think about or what are you curious about when it comes to AI and trust? AI and power? Let me know. Really, be in touch because I’m wondering, what do we as conscious, intentional communicators need to be thinking about when it comes to AI and trust, AI and power, AI and other people, as we go about our work.
I’d like to stay with this moment of connecting trust to design, to how we go about our work, and tease the upcoming episode, which is another interview. And this time I get to interview Lakshmi Grama. Lakshmi Grama is the former Associate Director for Dissemination and Digital Communications at National Cancer Institute. She oversaw Cancer.gov. So there’s just so much that we could talk about.
And when I asked Lakshmi, we eventually landed on her stories about how NCI has this very participatory, very collaborative approach to the communication that it put, the clinical trials information that it put, on its website, specifically Cancer.gov. So she has stories about user input and shaping this information. I really think you’ll enjoy hearing from her. I’ve been a stickler about this, and Lakshmi and Renata have also–they’re on board with this–is how involving the public, communities, users, it’s not just a tactic. It’s not a step. It’s not even a whole phase in a larger process.
It’s a stance, to borrow a term from my mentor. It’s a stance. It has to be throughout. Being person-centered is being person-centered at every step.
And this draws us back to trust, I think, because being person-centered at every step doesn’t magically give us a pass on trust. I think you’ll appreciate Lakshmi’s stories and how they raise questions about how we decide who gets to shape communication, what counts as good communication and who says? And what do these design processes look like in our organizations? What do they have to do with trust? What do they have to do with power?
So in this kind of big moment, after a big moment, after our viral-in-podcast-land experience, I wanted to pause. Not to digest things and tell you how to think about trust. But to maybe open a few threads. Make a few observations, and yes, recommit to this approach that is in all of my work, including in this show. And we’re going to keep our eye on power, and we’re going to keep our eye on participation, and we’re going to be reflexive about it too.
And I want to thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for downloading. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for telling your friends. It’s such an honor to be walking this path with you.
If these themes resonate with your work and you’re exploring how to build trust and design meaningful health communication, let’s connect. I’m always interested in partnering with organizations ready to elevate their strategies. This has been 10 minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners. Audio Engineering and Music by Joe Liebel, additional Music from Alexis Rounds. Thanks for listening to 10 minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners, LLC. Find us at healthcommunicationpartners .com.