Listen to Me

by R. L. Howser on January 10, 2012

As you focus on these words, you feel yourself getting sleepy,…..… sleeeepy,………..….sleeeeeeeepy.

No?

Does hypnosis even work?  Can I really make you squawk and dance like a chicken?

At its most basic level, there is nothing magical or mystical about hypnosis. It’s not mind control. You can’t make anyone do anything they don’t want to do. It is simply the focusing of the mind and the quieting of the mental chatter that tends to rattle around our heads most of the time, allowing us to gain access to the deeper, more primal, levels of the consciousness.

It’s what athletes call being “in the zone”; the state of intense focus and awareness that allows the athlete to react without thought and perform far better than they can with conscious effort.

It’s the state that a great movie or novel can induce, one in which we are so absorbed by the story that we completely shut out the world around us, immerse ourselves in the experience, lose all sense of the passage of time and uncritically accept the most outlandish twists of narrative.

If you ever driven for thirty minutes with barely any memory of the journey or spent hours lost in an intense video game, music or dancing, you’ve been in a hypnotic state.

So what does that have to do with speaking?

So often in business, or in life, our ideas, our suggestions, our visions are dismissed by others before they are fully and honestly considered. The modern world is a complex, frenetic place and we are all overwhelmed with information. It is human nature for people to save time and energy by instantly categorizing what they hear or see into known groups, so they can mentally process them as all the same.

You might be presenting a novel way to invest in gold futures, but many will hear the word gold and instantly categorize you as just another “goldbug”. They’ll dismiss you without even listening to the specifics of what you are trying to say.

You might be presenting a plan to purchase some specific parts from overseas, but many will instantly think “outsourcing”, and lump you in with every other plan to send production jobs out of the country.

You might be trying to raise funds for a worthy project, but many will instantly think to themselves, “We can’t afford it. Not in this economy.” They’ll shut down before you can even demonstrate how important your cause is.

If you could just get them to listen, without instantly categorizing and rejecting your ideas based on their own preconceptions, they just might see the merits of what you are suggesting.

That’s what you have the power to do. You can lead them into a type of hypnotic state that will allow you to really communicate with them; to plant your words deep into their minds.

You can give them a single point of focus by drawing their attention to you and your voice, to the exclusion of everything around them.

You can speak with the calm, measured, powerful voice of authority that allows them to trust you.

You can use stories to immerse them in an experience that makes your point far more vividly than you ever could with your claims.

You can pull them in until they are so intensely focused on you and your words, so open to your opinions and arguments, that they really hear what you are saying.

Real hypnotists, if there is such a thing, will scream, “That’s not hypnosis”, and that’s fine with me. Call it focus. Call it a flow state or being in the speaking zone. Call it mystical mesmerization, if you like.

No one is going to do anything that is against their own interests, just because you told them to. But when you grab and hold the undivided attention of your audience, you have the power to communicate at a deeper and far more effective level than you do when they are only half listening.

You have a fighting chance to get your point across.

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Those Who CAN, Teach

by R. L. Howser on December 30, 2011

I’ve always hated that old saying, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.”  I hate it not only because it is demeaning to teachers, but because it’s absolutely not true. Some of the worst teachers I have had in my life were very successful in their fields. They may have been highly acclaimed for their knowledge and skill, but they certainly didn’t have any idea how to convey what they knew and did to others.

Whenever we speak, we are teaching, and teaching is a skill unto itself. There is a lot more to it than just being good at something.

A good teacher or speaker needs, first of all, to be able to distill the essential building blocks of knowledge. The vast majority of information in any discipline is trivial detail. A good teacher or speaker teases out the most essential facts and ideas, principals and procedures that the audience needs to understand.

The next step is to craft a clear and simple expression of each of those essential ideas. Albert Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it.” A good teacher or speaker labors until he or she can express each essential idea in one short, crisp, memorable statement.

The teacher or speaker then takes those essential ideas and orders them in a logical and intuitive flow that builds a scaffold of understanding for all of the information that is to follow. One class, seminar or presentation can’t possibly cover every bit of information about any subject, but a framework of essential facts and principals can forever influence the understanding that the student or audience brings to any future learning by helping them judge the validity and relevance of any new information and showing them where that new information fits into the overall scheme of things. That’s what a good teacher or speaker does; shape the way others will think in the future.

There is no right or wrong way to do any of this; only ways that are more, or less, effective in a given situation. It’s as much an art as a science and comes mainly from experience.

In time, good teachers and speakers learn to read their audience. By monitoring facial expressions, body language and the atmosphere of the class or venue as a whole, they get a sense for when it’s working and when it’s not. They just know when they need to slow down, repeat or review and when it’s time to move on to the next point. They can feel when they need to turn up the energy or to tone it down.

Teaching is a talent that some people seem to be born with, a skill that some develop over time and a mystery that others just never seem to get a handle on.

It’s a hell of a lot more than a fallback for those who can’t hack it in their profession.

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Numa Numa Charisma

by R. L. Howser on December 19, 2011

A recent David Pogue column in the New York Times, on viral internet memes, gave me a bit of a jolt and made me rethink the fundamental meaning of the word “Charisma”

The post, “Internet Memes 101: A Guide to Online Wackiness” is a list of some of the classic viral videos from YouTube, as well as some recent hits, that have taken on a life of their own and become a part of the culture.

One of the videos Pogue mentions is “Numa Numa”, an early webcam video of a chunky, young man, named Gary Brolsma, lip syncing to an obscure Romanian pop song.

What struck me, in addition to the abysmal technical quality of the early webcam videos, was Pogue’s comment that, “There’s such earnestness and charisma in his performance that you can’t tear your eyes away.”

Charisma?

When I think of the word, I picture people like Bill Clinton, Brad Pitt and Nelson Mandela, not Gary Brolsma, but it is true. He is mesmerizing.

Realizing that made me think again about the meaning of the word. If charisma is the ability to draw and hold the attention of others, the way a celebrity does when he or she walks into a room, then Mr. Brolsma certainly demonstrates charisma. Why else would millions of people have watched the video, some of them dozens of times?

That charisma is born of two qualities that we would all be wise to cultivate and emulate in our own speaking.

First of all, Brolsma is completely unselfconscious. The virtue, I’m sure, of making a video from the privacy of his own room is that he couldn’t even imagine the possibility that someday millions of people would be watching his performance.

There’s an expression that we should always, “Dance as if nobody is watching”, and that’s what Brolsma is doing. In his endearing goofiness, his focus is not on himself, but on the song and the camera. He is so relaxed, so clearly not conscious of how he looks, that it gives him a supremely confident air.

Confidence signifies authority and power. We can’t really will ourselves to be confident, but we can control how relaxed we are. We can consciously learn to stay relaxed when we speak and our audience will interpret that as confidence, power and authority.

The second element of Brolsma’s performance is that it is extremely dynamic. Change is what grabs and holds our attention. In the video, there is a major change every few seconds. Brolsma changes his posture, position, expression or gesture. The music changes tone, voice, energy or volume. The rhythm of the words changes. There’s not a static moment in the entire clip and that’s that keeps our attention riveted.

Dynamic energy is interesting. We can’t really be interesting on purpose, but we can learn to be more dynamic and continually change how we present ourselves and our material to our audience. That will grab and keep the interest of our audience.

The combination of the relaxed appearance of confidence and frequent and unpredictable change is what makes the Numa Numa video so fascinating.

It is also what makes a speaker fascinating. Displaying a relaxed confidence and being dynamically interesting will give you the charisma you need to mesmerize your audience. It will make you as charismatic as Gary Brolsma.

Numa Numa.

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Write Tightly and Speak Loosely

by R. L. Howser on December 10, 2011

Congratulations! You’ve been granted 15 minutes to argue your case. All you need to do now is write and deliver a persuasive presentation.

Fortunately, writing a presentation is easy. All you have to do is think about your subject and write down the words that come to mind, start a new paragraph for each new point and stop when you reach the end of your thoughts.

When you finish typing 15 minutes worth, for most people around 1800-2000 words, you’re done. You’ve reached the level of the average speaker; even surpassed the many that don’t bother to write anything down at all.

Writing a good presentation is harder. You have to first think about what you are trying to achieve and what message you want the audience to remember. You have to build your argument around that message, support your positions with facts, figures and anecdotes and shape a logical flow to the ideas that makes them easy to follow. Then you have to craft an opening that will get the audience’s attention and prepare them to hear and accept that message and an ending that will sum up your argument in a compelling and memorable way and direct the audience to do what you want.

A speaker with a compelling message, a well thought out and supported argument and a clear, logical structure is already so far ahead of the game that it’s tempting to stop there.

But why stop at good? Why not go for great?

Writing a great presentation can be excruciatingly difficult. It’s not about what you add to the speech, at that point, but rather what you take away. It’s the stripping away of every paragraph, every sentence, every word that doesn’t contribute directly to the clear communication of your message.

“Killing your babies”, as it is often called, usually involves deleting all of the parts of your speech you like most; the funny stories, the intriguing statistics and the fascinating digressions that feel like the best-written, most entertaining parts. They are usually the parts that you spent the most time working on too and it hurts to kill them, but it’s absolutely necessary.

In the words of Strunk and White, “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”

I would add that a presentation should contain no unnecessary paragraphs, stories, examples, slides or data, either.  Keep going back to the purpose of your presentation for guidance and cut, rewrite and tighten until there is absolutely nothing else you do to make it shorter and have it still make sense.

What’s left should have all the cold, hard beauty of a high performance sports car or jet fighter, engineered for speed, strength and control, and nothing else.

The crisp, clear simplicity of the structure is what makes it easy to remember when you are on stage. It gives you a solid framework to work from should you need to improvise or adjust to circumstances. It gives you a rock solid base to return to, should you get sidetracked.

So if you did your job right, you should go on stage or stand up in the meeting with 10 lean, mean, persuasive minutes of material; not even enough to fill your 15 minute time slot. That’s what you want.

Now there’s no need to rush. You can speak with the measured pace of authority. You can take the time to pause, to let them think about what you are about to say or reflect on what you said. You can field questions from the boss or client. You can digress to explain a fundamental concept.

You can take your time, relax and speak like the confident, competent professional that you are.

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A Natural-Born Star

by R. L. Howser on December 3, 2011

The last two posts I’ve put up, about speakers that fly by the seat of their pants (Coulda / Woulda / Shoulda) and grinders who memorize every word and gesture (The Uncanny Valley), represent the two extremes of preparing speeches and presentations, but there is a better way that takes the best of the two approaches.

I had a roommate in university, named Rich, who wanted to be a veterinarian. It’s even tougher to get into veterinary school than medical school, so Rich needed to get straight A’s to even have a chance.

When final exams came around in his freshman year, and all of his classmates were grinding away at their studies, Rich announced that he was going to Panama, where his father was stationed with the military. As a dependent of a military officer, he could fly free on military transports. He told everyone who would listen that he planned to take full advantage of that little perk and relax during the week before finals.

His classmates all told him he was crazy, as he blithely packed his bags for a week of swimming, hiking and drinking on the beach. He even got a call from his university faculty advisor warning him that he needed to take his studies more seriously.

When he returned, suntanned and full of stories of wild parties and grand adventures, to everyone’s amazement, he aced all of his tests with some of the highest scores in his class. And thus, the legend of Rich, the natural-born genius, began to spread among both the students and the faculty.

What his classmates and advisor didn’t know, but he later confessed to me, was that he had never gone to Panama. He had driven out of town and spent a week in a cheap motel, studying night and day under a sun-tanning lamp.

Rich was an early believer in personal branding, and the reputation for academic brilliance that he cemented with that little stunt served him very well in the remainder of his time as an undergraduate.

It put him on the radar of the faculty members as an up-and-coming star and ensured that he got the benefit of the doubt in his tests and course work. He became the guy that other students wanted to work with on projects and study with before tests. When it came time to apply for veterinary school, he had no shortage of high-powered personal recommendations in his pocket and he got into the school that was his top choice.

I haven’t heard from Rich since, but I have no doubt he is a successful veterinarian somewhere. He was aware of something that all speakers would be smart to learn; that by preparing hard, you can make it look easy, and when you make it look easy, everyone assumes you are just naturally talented.

By all means, work harder than everyone else. Prepare to the hilt. Be ready for any contingency. Rehearse until you know your material backward and forward.

But when it is time to step up in front of your audience, throw that all out the window. Connect with your audience. Respond to the feedback they are giving you. Use all of that preparation to adjust your course on the fly to better serve their needs and address their concerns.

Make it look easy and natural. Let them think you’re making it up as you go. Let them assume you’re just a natural-born speaking star.

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The Uncanny Valley

by R. L. Howser on November 19, 2011

Not long after writing my last post, Coulda / Woulda / Shoulda, about poorly prepared speakers, I happened to see a speaker who had taken the exact opposite approach.

This guy was so totally prepared that it hurt to watch him.  Every word, every gesture, every pause was so carefully memorized, so deliberately presented that he reminded me of  the computer animated graphics of human characters that we sometimes see in the latest video games and movies.

There’s an odd effect that occurs in CG animation. While most of us are perfectly willing to suspend disbelief and enjoy the antics of computer generated toys (Toy Story), fish (Finding Nemo) and blue-skinned aliens (Avatar), the  closer the characters get to looking like real humans, the less convincing they become and the creepier they seem.

This phenomenon, known as the “uncanny valley”, is caused by the lack, or the incongruence, of the very subtle cues of voice, expression and gesture that we have come to expect from our fellow humans. We are all exquisitely sensitive to the meaning of even the most nuanced tilt of the head, slant of an eyebrow or the twitch of the lip in another person. The absence, or mismatch, of these very subtle signals, in even the most artfully rendered digitally generated characters, gives them an empty quality that just creeps us out. They look like robots, vacantly mouthing the words coming from their mouths.

The presenter I saw, whose every word and move was so carefully choreographed, failed because he was so focused on doing his presentation perfectly that he lost sight of his audience. He failed engage us as a human being, with all the attendant social signals that we’ve come to expect from our own species.

His presentation was technically excellent – his content was well structured, he clearly knew his subject well and his assertions were very well supported by statistics and anecdotes – but it was an impersonal performance, as wooden as a computer-generated character, rather than a personal conversation.

You may be the on only one speaking, when you are on stage, but you can’t forget that every presentation is still a conversation. If you’re not connecting with your audience, you’re not communicating.

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Coulda / Woulda / Shoulda

by R. L. Howser on October 31, 2011

“The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise and is not preceded by a period of worry and depression.“
-John Preston

I meet a lot of speakers who seem to wear their lack of preparation as a badge of honor. They show up for their presentation at the last moment, with a few notes scribbled on a napkin and a borrowed set of slides, and count on their wit, charm and charisma to carry them through.

Sometimes they manage to pull it off. A shoeshine and a smile will still take you a long way, as will a confident attitude, a deep knowledge of your subject and a quick wit, but an improvised presentation will always fall short of what it could have been.

It’s the coulda / woulda / shouldas that always come back to bite you. You realize during the Q&A that your data is not as up-to-date as it could have been, you would have been more effective if you had customized your PowerPoint file specifically for the client or you should have checked that the data file was compatible with the operating system version of the computer you are using.

There are three simple ways to guard against falling short of your presentation’s potential; preparation, rehearsal and feedback. These are not specialized techniques for advanced speakers. They are the fundamental requirements for getting the most out of the time and attention that your audience gives you.

Pay your audience the respect they deserve. Take the time to make your presentation more than the best you could do on the fly.

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The Sound and the Fury

by R. L. Howser on October 17, 2011

I’ve addressed this before, but when I teach delivery skills to my clients or students, they sometimes get the impression that I’m saying it’s all just a magic show; that a powerful delivery, full of drama and intrigue, will somehow hypnotize their audience into doing what they’re told. But of course, that’s not true at all.

A dynamic, confident delivery style will grab their attention long enough to get your message across, but it won’t make a poorly thought out, valueless or irrelevant message, or worse the lack of a coherent message, any more compelling. That’s particularly true if you are trying to effect a long-term change of beliefs or values, or build a lasting business relationship. Trying to dazzle the audience into doing something that is against their own interests is simply hucksterism. I’ll leave that to the politicians and the late-night infomercial barkers.

A compelling presentation is about the compelling logic of your message. It’s about offering your audience something of value, something that will benefit their lives or their bottom line. The distillation of that value into a short, simple message that they understand and remember is what determines the success or failure of your presentation.

The mechanics of effective delivery are simply about making sure your message cuts through the noise and confusion, so they will hear it and remember it.

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The Illusion of Communication

by R. L. Howser on September 24, 2011

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.“
-George Bernard Shaw

As a teacher, I struggle with a very simple problem. All too often, my students don’t seem to hear, understand or remember what I tell them. They are smart kids and good students, but sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter how many times I explain it to them, how simple I try to make it, or how many different ways I present it. It just doesn’t register. I may have said it, but if no learning has taken place, then I can’t really say I taught it.

That’s also the fundamental problem facing all presenters and speakers. We tend to operate under the illusion that a presentation or speech was successful if we clearly and accurately said what we intended to say, but the effect we have on our audience often depends not on how well we said something but on how prepared they were to hear it.

Sometimes, our audience simply doesn’t know enough to understand or appreciate what we are telling them. Sometimes, their own biases, blind spots and preconceptions prevent them from hearing us or distort our message into something completely different from what we intended to convey. Sometimes, they are preoccupied, tired or just in a foul mood. Sometimes, they just don’t like us or what we’re selling, and we’re always selling something when we speak.

It’s not enough, when you speak, to say what you meant to say. You also have to pay attention to your audience and confirm that they heard what you said, understood what it meant and processed its implications.

Only then can you say you successfully communicated.

 

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Of Polar Bears and Penguins

by R. L. Howser on September 14, 2011

I was leaving Haneda Airport in Tokyo, recently, when I ran across the following sight in the parking garage. This is a panel next to the elevator buttons.

 My first thought, I must admit, upon seeing the animal pictures next to the numbers for each floor was that it was taking the Japanese fondness for cute and cuddly a bit too far.

Yet upon reflection, I realized just how brilliant it was. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has found themselves in a parking garage trying to remember which floor I left my car on. Even worse, at the airport it’s often been several days since I left the car. My brain has probably processed dozens of floor, room, street, telephone and other numbers in that time. I’ve probably thought about a lot more numbers than I have polar bears, penguins or dolphins.

Written numbers are abstract concepts. The concept of using “4” to represent X, X, X and X may seem childishly simple, but as evolutionary advances go, it was a profoundly important development. As far as we can tell from prehistoric art and symbols, we’ve been doing it for less than 100,000 years.

Yet our prehistoric ancestors have had the ability to recognize and remember images, such as what other animals looked like, for millions of years. Their survival depended on it. Those ancient visual memory systems are far more robust and reliable than our rather recent and tenuous grasp of the abstract. That is why you are far more likely to forget someone’s telephone number than you are to forget what they look like.

Parking garage patrons are more likely to confuse 2 with 5 than they are to confuse penguins with dolphins, so to make it easier for them to remember their floor number, the designers gave them a more tangible association.   They just have to remember that they parked on the penguin floor.

As a speaker, you can use this same technique to make your abstract concepts easier to remember.

You can use PowerPoint to associate images with your ideas. If you are selling computer network security, an image of a bank vault door will anchor the concept far better than a dozen bullet points of technical data can.

You can use a prop to make a metaphor concrete. If you are trying to motivate your staff after a bad quarter, a glass half filled with water and placed dramatically on the podium can anchor the metaphor that a glass half empty is also a glass half full, and drive home the point that they need to keep the bad news in perspective.

You can use an action, a sound, an image, an analogy, a story or an acronym to anchor your abstract concepts to something that is easier to understand and remember.

Take a tip from the designer of the elevator panel. Make it easier for your audience to recall what you’ve told them. Give them something tangible to associate with your concepts.

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