Dig Deeper

by R. L. Howser on May 13, 2012

We are deep in the Toastmasters International Speech Contest season here in Japan. Fortunately, I’m still alive and kicking, so Toastmasters style speeches have been on my mind a lot recently.

We Toastmasters are prone to the emotional, inspirational and motivational type of contest speeches. I’ve written and given so many variations on “Don’t give up”, “You can do it” and “Follow your dreams”, that I think I could write and deliver one in my sleep. In fact, I think I have a few times.

But while the subject matter may have gotten a bit stale for me, it’s been a very valuable process, because it has taught me a lot about the craft of structuring, writing and delivering a speech. I’ve become quite proficient at producing a certain type of clever, entertaining riff on a motivational topic.

It’s just not enough for me anymore. The skills I have developed are valuable, but I want to use them to move beyond being clever and funny, and start talking honestly about things that matter, not just to me, but to everyone.

In that state of mind, I happened to stumble across this clip of the comedian, Louis C. K., speaking at a memorial tribute to George Carlin, the 60’s, counter-culture comedian who managed the trick of staying interesting, relevant and popular long after the 60’s had faded away.

If you’re easily offended by strong language, you might want to give the video a pass, but Louis says something here that strikes me as highly relevant to my own journey.

At about the 5:28 mark, he was talking about his amazement that Carlin came up with a new hour of brilliant comedy every year, while Louis, had been recycling the same hour of jokes that he had spent fifteen years building up.

When, in desperation at his stalled career, Louis threw out his entire act, he realized that, “When you’re done telling jokes about airplanes and dogs, when you throw those away, what do you have left? You can only dig deeper. Start talking about your feelings and who you are. And then you do those jokes and they’re gone, and you dig deeper. So then you start thinking about your fears and your nightmares.”

Louis took it a bit farther, for a laugh, but as I listened to him, it occurred to me that I had been doing the Toastmasters equivalent of speeches about airplanes and dogs; speeches about clever ideas. And the solution for me, as well, is to throw that all away and dig deeper.

So this year, my goal is to stop being clever and start being honest, start talking about who I am, what I feel, what scares or hurts me, what I want and where I’m going.  And it’s turning out to be a very scary proposition.

Talking about clever ideas has always given me a certain protective distance. The audience might not agree with what I say, but that’s OK. It’s not about me.  But when I honestly expose myself, and the audience doesn’t like it, it’s me they don’t like.

It’s terrifying to expose myself that way, not knowing how people are going to react. I feel emotionally naked on stage, but when I open myself up and the audience embraces me, it’s a communication that goes so far beyond a meeting of the minds. For the first time, I feel like I am really connecting with my audience, instead of just talking at them.

As uncomfortable as it can be, if I want to improve as a speaker, I’ve simply got to dig deeper.

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Use a Story to Tell THE Story

by R. L. Howser on May 5, 2012

In my last post, Tell THE Story, perhaps I left the impression that telling a personal story or the larger story is an either/or proposition, but it occurs to me that good writers often find ways to do both. They use a personal story as a vehicle to bring the larger story into focus in a compelling and dramatic form.

The book and movie, Moneyball, is a good example of this. It’s the story of a change in the way statistics are used to evaluate the performance of baseball players. It’s not a very sexy subject, but the writer, Michael Lewis grounds it in the story of Oakland Athletics General Manager, Billy Beane and the 2002 Oakland Athletics baseball team

Beane knew he couldn’t compete financially with the richest teams in the league that had many times more money to spend on player’s salaries.  He needed a new approach to evaluating talent that could find hidden value in the players he could afford. So he used the Sabermetrics statistical approach to find players that had been overlooked by the big boys, and in the process, changed the game of baseball.

As a story, it follows the classic structure of a plucky underdog struggling to overcome a more powerful enemy through guile and strategy. The only element missing is the final triumph, but that was missing from the Oakland A’s season that year, too.

Lewis invests us emotionally in the “Why” of the hero’s struggles, before he introduces the “How” of mathematics and statistics. Sabremetrics, which even dedicated baseball fans can find intimidatingly dense, simply becomes “the plan”.

We don’t need to understand every detail of the plan, just as we don’t need to understand the details of Danny Ocean’s plan to rob the casino, in Ocean’s 11 or the details of Luke Skywalker’s plan to blow up the Deathstar, in Star Wars.

Lewis is able to salt enough information into the narrative to give us the general idea of what Sabremetrics is – a way to mathematically evaluate the true contributions of players to their team’s success, allowing a savvy General Manager to find players that were undervalued and would be cheaper to sign or trade for.

But even as his characters are explaining the mathematical “How”, Lewis never forgets that the “Why” is the heart of the story.  It’s the heart of every story.

Why is the Euro collapsing? That’s the heart of the story.

Why is the Presidential campaign getting so nasty? That’s the heart of the story.

Why is the company facing bankruptcy, hiring new workers or closing its plant in China? That’s the heart of the story.

Every one of them is a story about people responding to pressures by making choices with far-reaching consequences.

That’s the “Why”. That’s the story.

The “How” is just the details.

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Tell THE Story

by R. L. Howser on April 23, 2012

It’s nothing new to say that stories are one of the most powerfully effective ways of communicating an idea. A well-told story tends to bypass many of the critical filters that we put up to block the onslaught of claims and sales pitches that assault us every day.

Tell me that your all-terrain vehicle can cross rivers and I’ll think, “Yeah, maybe”, but show me, or tell me about, a gritty, old cowboy crossing rivers on your vehicle to find a lost calf and I’ll readily accept it. After all, I experienced it happening through your story.

But I think we make a mistake when we limit ourselves to personal stories. While a story can be a powerful way to hook and hold your audience’s attention, sometimes a story is not THE story.

There are times when the story you need to tell is bigger than that. The experiences of one person can illustrate one aspect of the issue, but the very smallness of its view can’t help but obscure the larger picture.

The story of the search for a cure for AIDS is complex and technical. Personalizing the matter with the story of one desperately ill patient, holding on grimly in hope of a miracle, is a way of making the real stakes palpably clear, while bringing the massive crisis down to a human scale. It’s a compelling and important story, but is that THE story?

The real story is one of brilliant, but flawed, people battling an implacable foe. It’s a story of magnanimous cooperation and vicious, petty rivalry. It’s a story of foolish stubbornness and inspired genius, of dogged detective work and flashes of brilliant insight, of giddy hopes and crushing disappointments.

It’s a story with a grand cast of characters and the dramatic arc and sweep of a Wagnerian opera; a story that can be told with all of the same tools and techniques that Hollywood uses in blockbuster movies, like Titanic, E.T. and Armageddon.

You can use storytelling techniques to show how opposing forces with conflicting desires faced off in a rising drama that led to a dramatic resolution. You can use them to convey the grand sweep of the entire drama.

Even dry subjects like sub-prime mortgage meltdown, the financial crisis in Europe or political campaign finance reform can be explained and illuminated as stories. On the surface they seem like they are just about the numbers, but any good mathematician, accountant or engineer will tell you that there is a story within the numbers.

That’s the real story you should be telling.

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Celebrating Toastmasters

by R. L. Howser on April 8, 2012

I have spent more than 20,000 hours speaking in front of high school and university classes. I’ve given more than a hundred speeches in Toastmasters; 30 of them high-pressure contest speeches.  I have spoken in English and I’ve spoken in Japanese – English is easier. I’ve spoken to industry association meetings and Christmas parties, young entrepreneurs and C-level executives.

And yesterday, I gave one of the most important and challenging speeches of my life.

I spoke at a wedding reception.

Wedding speeches are often rambling, boozy affairs, full of bad jokes and inappropriate stories, but not this one. This was the wedding of a former student, a young women I began teaching when she was ten years old. Over the nearly fifteen years since, I’ve taught her and her entire family at various times.

I’ve watched Eri-chan grow from a cute little girl to a beautiful, charming young woman, fluent in Japanese and English, and now living in Shanghai, China and studying Chinese.

I’m so proud of her and I wanted my speech to reflect that, so I took it as seriously as a major contest speech, mixing Japanese and English for the sake of the guests who wouldn’t understand one or the other.

When I stepped up to the microphone, in front of more than 200 guests, in the luxurious ballroom at Chinzan-so, I knew how to give a speech that expressed my feelings clearly, powerfully and honestly.

As I sat at my table waiting for my turn to speak, I was extremely nervous. And yet, because of my Toastmasters training I knew that was normal, so I didn’t allow it to paralyze me. I turned that energy into power and focus.

I am far from fluent in Japanese, but because of the opportunities I’ve had to speak in Japanese at my bilingual Toastmasters club, I knew that I could pull it off, and I did; by all accounts, flawlessly.

My feelings about Eri-chan were complex and emotional, yet through Toastmasters I have learned to take a complex issue, find the central narrative line and then use it to weave story and fact together. I knew to structure my entire message around a simple and repeated theme; that we were there to celebrate this young couple.

My emotions nearly overtook me as I looked at this radiant young woman, no longer a girl, stunning in her white wedding gown, but Toastmasters has taught me how to keep my composure, not by suppressing my feelings, but by expressing them.

In Toastmasters, I have learned to project my voice and enunciate my words. I’ve learned to use vocal tone, intonation and pause to emphasize and define my meaning. I’ve learned to stand tall and stay calm. Through speech after speech, it has become as natural as breathing.

So when I stepped up to the microphone, I didn’t have to think about any of it. I could focus on my feelings for this beautiful, young bride. I could speak from my heart, knowing that I had the skills to convey my thoughts and feelings to the audience.

And for that, I celebrate Toastmasters.

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The Source of the Problem

by R. L. Howser on March 22, 2012

As an English presentation and speech consultant, living and working in Japan, the majority of my clients are either local hires working in multi-national firms that are having trouble presenting in the international corporate environment, or they work in domestic Japanese businesses that want to expand into the global market and need to be able to do sales and marketing presentations that are up to international standards.

In either case, I’m generally called in after a disastrous experience. I’ve heard horror stories of audience members having loud conversations, falling asleep or walking out in the middle of a presentation. One bewildered executive even told me of being cut off and dismissed in mid-sentence by an ill-tempered American businessman.

That used to puzzle me. While I understand that it is more difficult to present in a language that is not your native tongue, such negative reactions are extreme even by American standards. The presentations couldn’t possibly have been THAT bad, could they? These same executives were very experienced at presenting in their own language.

The answer came to me from a student of mine. I teach an online, presentation skills class at a famous, internet-based MBA program here in Japan. The students watch video lectures, post videos of their own presentations and then interact with me and each other through an online forum.

My students are mostly working executives, in their thirties and forties, at large, multi-national firms. They have many years of experience in both the domestic Japanese and global workforce.

When I asked them, as part of a discussion exercise, to describe a typical Japanese sales presentation, one woman’s answer both shocked and amused me.

Question:        How are most Japanese business presentations organized?

Answer:          Most of presentations are organized something like this:

1) Introduction: 15min  

This part is the most important for the presenter because they have to introduce their company’s long, long history.

2) Body: 20min

Suddenly they talk about a product which they want to sell today. Unfortunately they don’t raise any problems or present solutions; they just announce their commercial slogan.

3) Conclusion: 1min

They just tell audience the telephone number or URLs to contact them.

4) Extra: 10min

There are no questions from the audience, but they want to exchange business cards.

At first, I was sure she was joking, but none of the other students disputed her answer, and when I showed it to some friends who work in Japanese companies, every one of them said that, while a bit exaggerated perhaps, it was not that far off the mark.

I think I’m beginning to understand the source of the problem.

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Don’t be like King, Jobs or Robbins

by R. L. Howser on March 15, 2012

“古人の跡を求めず、古人の求めたるところを求めよ”
(“I do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. I seek what they sought.”)
-Japanese Poet, Matsuo Basho

I often show my students clips of excellent speakers, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs and Anthony Robbins, because I want them to see just how effective a speaker can be.

I can talk at them for hours, but I think they learn more from a few minutes of seeing and hearing a great speaker than they do from all of my yammering. It makes my explanations and suggestions more concrete and credible, if they can experience the effect of a dynamic voice, a well-timed pause or crisp, articulate language on themselves.

Yet in some ways, watching such great speakers seems to discourage them. They can’t imagine ever being that confident, that skillful, that powerful on stage.

I have to point out to them that the goal isn’t to speak as well as King, Jobs or Robbins, or any of the other skilled speakers we watch, nor even to speak as well as I do, which is a considerable notch below.

The goal is for each student to do what those great speakers are doing for the reasons that they are doing it.

The goal is not just to speak as dynamically as Martin Luther King Jr. did, but to speak dynamically for the same reason he did; because it grabs and holds the attention of the audience by adding meaning and emotion to the words you’re saying.

The goal is not to use pacing and pause to radiate authority and charisma the way Steve Jobs did, but to use pacing and pause for the same reason he did, because it draws the audience to you in anticipation and gives them space to mentally process what you say and add their own experiences, expectations and hopes to your words.

The goal is not to speak as crisply and articulately as Anthony Robbins does, but to choose your words precisely for the same reason he does, because good speaking comes from clear thinking, and making the effort to choose crisp, vivid, distinct words gives you the best chance to convey your true meaning and intention.

These speakers, and many more just like them, use their speaking skill not to impress their audiences or to put on a show, but to connect them with at the deepest and most profound levels and compel them to change.

Seeking wisdom led Matsuo Basho along the same path as the wise that preceded him, not because he was following them, but because he going to the same place, seeking the same wisdom.

Becoming dynamic, charismatic and articulate speakers is not our goal, at least I hope not. The goal is to teach, persuade, lead and inspire people to change. Learning to do that will require us to build the same skills that have made other speakers great, not because we want to be like them, even if we could, but because those are the skills that drive effective speeches and presentations.

That is what we must seek.

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The Magic Button

by R. L. Howser on February 26, 2012

Have you every struggled with a section of a speech? Maybe one of your stories isn’t quite making the point you want it to, your analogy feels tired or labored or you can’t figure out a clean, logical transition between points.

I can’t tell you how many times it has happened to me. I rewrite, rewrite and rewrite, but I just don’t seem to get any closer to a solution.

Actually, that’s not true. I usually do eventually discover the solution to my problem. And ninety percent of the time, it’s that magic button on top right of my keyboard, the one that says, “Delete”.

That nagging feeling you have that something isn’t working is often your lizard brain telling you that what you are trying to do just isn’t necessary. You’re not finding a good solution because there isn’t one. The point you are trying to make is the problem.

Of course, that isn’t always true, but it is something to consider. The quickest way of solving a problem is sometimes not to fix it, but to just get rid of it.

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The Only Result that Matters

by R. L. Howser on February 21, 2012

What makes a sales call on a potential customer a success?

Is it the fact that you didn’t get lost on the way to their office, that you arrived on time or that you remembered to bring your briefcase with all of your sales materials with you?

Was it a successful visit if you made it all the way through your sales pitch without forgetting any important points, you left some brochures behind or the client smiled at you?

Is any of that going to impress your bosses, when you get back to the office?

As a sales representative you are judged on one thing, and one thing only; results.  If you didn’t make the sale, or at least make some progress towards an eventual sale, you can’t really call your visit a success.

Speakers and presenters are no different, but we measure results not necessarily in terms of financial transactions, but rather in change.

If we didn’t trigger some change in our audience; a change in what they think, a change in how they feel, a change in what they believe or a change in what they will do, either now or in the future, we can’t really call our presentation a success.

It doesn’t matter that we wrote a good script or made some beautiful PowerPoint slides.

It doesn’t matter that we wore our best suit or outfit, polished our shoes until they gleamed or that we had a good hair day.

It doesn’t matter that we gave the whole presentation without notes, remembering all fourteen key points, in order, or even that we got a standing ovation.

All that matters is whether we triggered the change that we wanted in our audience.

That’s the result – the only result – that matters.

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Verbal White Space

by R. L. Howser on February 15, 2012

“White space is the space on the page that is not occupied by any text or graphics. You might call it blank space. Beginners tend to be afraid of white space. Professional designers “use” lots of white space.”
-Robin Williams (No, not that one), in the Non-Designer’s Design Book

A good graphic designer knows that empty space is not something that needs to be filled. It’s an important part of the design, the part that allows the other elements to breathe. It’s what sets the important elements apart from the background so they stand out visually. It gives them room to move in the viewer’s mind.

This famous newspaper advertisement for the Volkswagen “Bug” is perhaps an extreme example of graphic white space.

A beginning graphic designer would have probably filled the whole page with the image, adding “LOW PRICE”, “GREAT GAS MILEAGE” and “IMPORTED FROM EUROPE” in a big, bold, screaming font for impact

But the designer of this ad had the experience and confidence to know how to use white space, not only to make his point, “Think small”, but also to grab your attention and draw you in. The expansive emptiness of the page both makes the image of the car stand out on the page and makes the advertisement stand out from the rest of the newspaper’s contents.

In fact, I think you could argue that the white space is the most important part of this ad. That’s what makes it work.

As a speaker, you can use verbal white space – silence – in the same way.

Beginning speakers are usually terrified of silence. They fill it with “Umms” and Ahhhs”. They fill it with twitches, nervous gestures and aimless movement. They fill it with greetings, thank yous and apologies. They babble and digress; anything but standing silently in front of their audience.

Great speakers know that it is the silence of the moments in which you are not speaking – white space – that make the words you say more powerful.

It’s the silence between your words that shapes the meaning of what you say.

It’s the silence that draws the ears of the audience to a particular word or phrase, giving it weight and impact.

It’s the silence that gives your listeners time to process your words and weave them into the fabric of their own experiences, thoughts, and feelings.

It’s the silence that gives your predetermined speech or presentation an air of authenticity and spontaneity that more closely resembles natural conversation.

It’s the silence that makes you sound more confident, powerful and authoritative, because it shows that you are not afraid to stand naked in the stillness.

It’s the artful use of silence – white space – that distinguishes you from an ordinary speaker

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Perceptions

by R. L. Howser on February 7, 2012

“When we taste a wine, we aren’t simply tasting the wine. This is because what we experience is not what we sense. Rather, experience is what happens when our senses are interpreted by our subjective brain, which brings to the moment its entire library of personal memories and idiosyncratic desires.”
-Jonah Lehrer , in The Frontal Cortex blog

Many presenters, particularly those in the academic and technical fields, persist in the delusion that content is all that matters. They think they can continue to bumble, stumble and fumble their way through their presentations and have their work judged strictly on its own objective merits. But they’re wrong.

Most of us like to think of ourselves as relatively rational, logical and objective in our judgments and choices, but the evidence says otherwise.  Irrelevant perceptions can have a powerful effect on our thinking.

In his blog, The Frontal Cortex, Lehrer describes two of the more famous studies, carried out by Frederic Brochet of the University of Bordeaux, that showed the effect of subjective perception on wine drinkers.

Brochet found that when experts were served two glasses of the same white wine, but with red food coloring in one, they were unable to tell that the two glasses held the same wine, or even that the “red” was actually a white.

In another study, Brochet put an average red wine in two different bottles, one bottle from an expensive grand-cru and the other from an ordinary, cheap table wine, and asked the experts to rate them. The perceptions of the tasters were markedly different. The experts rated the wine from the expensive bottle far more highly than the same wine from the cheap bottle.

I mention this not just to bash insufferable wine snobs (though that is a nice bonus), but rather to point out the critical role of your audience’s perception of you, your apparent authority and your presentation skills on their understanding of your content.

They can’t help but see the shy, hesitant speaker as unsure of her own conclusions, or judge the speaker who struggles with his computer and projector as perhaps technically incompetent in his field, as well. The effect may be subtle, and the content interesting or significant enough to overcome it, but it’s still there.

Conversely, they can’t help but be impressed with the competent and confident speaker and transfer that feeling onto the content of the presentation.

It’s impossible to say, over the course of a career, how many times ineffective presentation has been the difference between a grant funded and one rejected, between a sale made and a polite dismissal or between getting the job you want and a promise to keep your resume on file.

The margin between success and failure, for a career or a company, can be so small. Can any of us really afford to give away that edge?

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