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Don’t be like King, Jobs or Robbins

by R. L. Howser on March 15, 2012 · 0 comments

“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 · 3 comments

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 the 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 · 0 comments

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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5

Verbal White Space

by R. L. Howser on February 15, 2012 · 5 comments

“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 · 0 comments

“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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I only do Business Presentations

by R. L. Howser on February 1, 2012 · 0 comments

I was teaching a presentation skills class the other day, at a famous internet marketing company, when one of my students said something that I’ve heard dozens of variations on before.

I had the students working on using their voices more expressively, by taking one simple sentence and seeing how many different inflections of meaning, emphasis, tone and rhythm that could put in it.

One student was resisting the exercise, saying the sentence in the same flat, wooden monotone each time. I tried to cajole him into loosening up and having some fun with it, but he just shrugged his shoulders and said, “This is useless to me. I only do business presentations.”

In a moment of frustration, I said, “You mean, you only do boring presentations.”

It was not my finest moment as a teacher, but I thought the point was valid. A business presentation shouldn’t be a song and dance, but nor should it be a death march through a wasteland of facts and data.

If you’ve got something of importance to say; something that it will benefit your audience to know and understand, then you should deliver it in a way that will engage their attention and impart the meaning that you intend.

How you say the words – the tone, the rhythm and the emphasis you put on them – changes how they are heard. Those same words, delivered in an email or spoken in a monotone, leave themselves open to a wide variety of interpretations, not all of them helpful to your cause or career.

Words that might be discouraging on their own can be delivered in a calm and confident manner that gives them a subtle undertone of optimism. A warning that has to be mildly worded for legal reasons can be delivered with a tone of gravity and foreboding that leaves no doubt as to its seriousness. The words you chose to emphasize can reinforce, or diminish, your stated priorities.

I’m not going to misuse the famous Mehrabian study, as so many do, but in fact your voice, eye contact, posture, expressions and gestures are a large and powerfully persuasive part of your communication.

Failing to develop those aspects of your business skills portfolio makes you less effective than you could be as a communicator and as a leader.

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Tell them WHAT to think

by R. L. Howser on January 29, 2012 · 0 comments

One of the first things I do, when I take on a client that needs to develop a presentation, is to ask them what they are trying to accomplish. Why are they giving the presentation?

Far too often, they tell me they are doing it because they were either asked, or told, to speak, as if speaking itself were the goal. When I press them to tell me what they want to happen as a result of their presentation, they often fall back on some variation of, “I want the audience to think about …..”

It is certainly possible to use the time and attention your audience has granted you to induce them to think about a situation, to trigger doubts or to evoke emotions. That is an improvement over having no purpose at all, but it still falls far short of what you could accomplish.

Why set your sights so low? When you speak, you have the power not just to get your audience to think, but to tell them what to think.

You have the power to tell them what the facts mean, how they affect your business strategy, what they indicate about emerging trends, how they fit into the historical perspective or what they imply about the future.

You can plant your ideas, your very words, into their minds and shape how they understand not only the situation at hand, but even how they understand future events.

All it takes is a plan. Once you know what you are trying to accomplish, the structure and the words tend to come fairly easily. The presentation virtually writes itself. The hard part is deciding what you want.

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Listen to Me

by R. L. Howser on January 10, 2012 · 0 comments

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 · 0 comments

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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4

Numa Numa Charisma

by R. L. Howser on December 19, 2011 · 4 comments

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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