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Forty years ago communications expert Albert Mehrabian did a little study that got an outsized reputation -- and is often misunderstood. Here's what he actually found, and what it means, in a short video from a speech last year. Enjoy!
For my blog today, I'm posting a brief excerpt from a speech I gave last year on communications. The clip explains mirror neurons and why they're important to understand. Enjoy!
For my blog today, I'm pointing to a piece I just posted on HBR.org, on how to save a doomed meeting. Enjoy! http://bit.ly/gHCqG2
I was very excited to see the work of a good friend, Josh Linkner, debut at number 1 on Amazon and Barnes & Noble today: Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity.
Josh’s argument is that the only sustainable business differentiator left is creativity, when anyone with a computer and a credit card can steal your existing business away by copying it in a matter of weeks. Business cycles have shrunk to no time at all. Creativity throughout your organization is what will keep your business on top, constantly reinventing products, ways to market, services, and so on. How do you delight your customers when the competition can do exactly what you can? Creativity.
If innovation is important to you, you need to read this book. But Josh’s twist on the usual insight into creativity and innovation is that creativity is something that needs to happen at all levels of the organization. Creativity and innovation are not just about the big blockbuster ideas – the iPhones and iPads – but also about everyday thinking: how to improve a process, how to save time and money in shipping, how to streamline a budgetary cycle. The difference between front-rank organizations and all the others is how well they keep innovating at all levels – and that takes creativity and Disciplined Dreaming.
We’ve worked with Josh on his ideas and his speaking, and his presentation is one not to be missed. You can check him out here. He’s also a professional jazz guitarist of 25 years’ standing, and the head of a new venture capital fund. Josh makes creativity seems effortless; read his book to find out how.
For my blog today, I'm pointing to a new ebook published recently by my friends at New Word City: How to Tell Great Business Stories. Everyone says you should be a storyteller, but no one tells you really how to do that. In this short ebook, I take all the mystery out of telling stories so that you can get started right away and make your next presentation, marketing program, or event memorable. Enjoy!
I’ve talked about how to scan other people’s body language efficiently, and how to begin to get a handle on your own by focusing on a specific emotion. Both those activities will take some practice, but the rewards will come, and they will be huge. Your awareness of what other people are intending will become razor-sharp and your own body language will become much more expressive, and therefore charismatic. So keep practicing.
The final step in this process of putting your unconscious mind to work for you in a conscious way is to manage the flow of communication between you and your audience, or in that meeting, or that conversation. By taking charge of the communication flow, you will be able to persuade others more easily and to take charge of many of the human interactions that take place throughout our day.
At the moment, your unconscious mind, and the unconscious minds of those around you are doing most of the work. We signal that we’re about to start or stop talking, for example, with blinks of the eye, movements of the head, and changes in body position. Because all of that is unconscious for most people, it’s easily controlled by becoming conscious about it yourself.
If you’ve practiced reading other people’s body language, and managing your own, you’ll be able to dedicate a small part of your conscious mind to managing the communication flow.
Here’s how you do it. Begin by mirroring the people in the room, or the folks that you’re chatting with, to make them comfortable. I’ve blogged about this technique before, and written about it in Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, if you’re not familiar with it. Once you’ve established trust with mirroring, you’ll be able to begin to lead the conversation by leaning slightly forward, for example, when you want the other person to stop talking because you have something to day. Or use a hand gesture to take the ‘public space’ between you – the gestural equivalent of standing up in a classroom to lead the group. The exact retinue of gestures that you use is up to you. Study other people to see how they do it (unconsciously) for ideas if your own natural repertoire is small.
This conscious managing of the conversation will take some practice, because you have to be very sure of your own body language, and that of others, before you will have the conscious ability to do this. But the payoffs in terms of persuasiveness, charisma, and leadership will be well worth it.
I began this series on body language by urging you to turn over body language chores to the most powerful part of your mind – your unconscious. I outlined a 3-step process for doing that in order to decode other people’s body language. It remains to talk about how to control your own.
People ask me all the time, “What do I do with my hands?” The real conundrum behind that question is that monitoring your own body language is extremely difficult for the conscious mind and it easily gets overwhelmed. The hands are simply the easiest and least distracting parts of your body to watch while still walking, talking, and chewing gum at the same time.
But here’s the problem. If you think consciously about moving your hands in a certain way as a speaker, or in a meeting, in order to emphasize a point, your gesture will come too late, and you’ll look awkward, bizarre, or fake. That’s because the natural sequence of events, according to recent brain research, is intent – gesture – thought – speech. The gesture actually comes before conscious thought. So if you try to think consciously about a gesture, you’ll start it too late, and it will come out of sequence with your words. You’ll look like one of those coached politicians who gesture awkwardly a split second after they talk, undercutting any belief in what they’re saying.
It simply doesn’t work very well – without hours of practice, at least – to try to reverse this sequence consciously, speeding up your gestures and slowing down your speech. The better way to get this done is to focus on something else – your intent – and let the gestures take care of themselves. Strong intent, or emotion, drives gesture when you’re not thinking about it, so it’s by far the better way to go.
The difficult part is in focusing your emotions consistently and clearly so that your gestures are equally clear and strong. To do that, you have to know what you want and how you feel about it during each meeting, presentation, or interview where you want to show up with effective, persuasive body language. And you have to keep the focus on that emotion – or those emotions – and not get distracted.
Most people go through their days telegraphing their state of mind, and it’s typically distracted. In other words, they’re not clear or focused; instead, they’re thinking about the to-do list, what to get for dinner, remembering to pay their taxes, getting a birthday present for a sister, and so on. When you walk into a meeting with that kind of attitude, you will have no charisma or persuasive force.
The first step to managing your own body language, then, is to forget about your body language and focus on your intent. What do you want to happen? What’s your emotional investment? Are you angry, happy, sad, delighted, excited – figure that out, focus on that, and your body language will line up behind that emotion and start expressing it clearly and powerfully.
Next time I’ll talk about step 2 – what to do after you’ve got your focus.
In the first blog in this series I recommended turning over your body language chores – monitoring your own body language and others’ – to your unconscious mind. Here are 3 easy steps to accomplishing the second half of that – monitoring others’ body language. I’ll cover how to handle your own body language in subsequent blogs.
1. Decide what you want to know. This step is critical, because it’s the way you get started tapping into your unconscious expertise. What is it that you want to understand about someone else’s body language? Is she lying? Is she the real decision maker? Is he going to offer you the job? Is he a threat to your career? Formulate the question in a simple yes-or-no format, a choice between 2 poles. Lying or not? In charge or not? And so on.
Figure this out before you go into the meeting, or the interview, or whatever the situation is, because you’re under too much pressure to pay attention and take part once you’re actually in the moment. This little step – of thinking ahead, figuring out how the meeting will go, and deciding the question you want to answer – will pay huge dividends in awareness as you get the hang of it over time.
2. Pose the question to your unconscious. Once you’ve figured out what you want to know, then sit still for a moment and pose the question to your unconscious mind. Say something like, “In this interview, I want to know is Jane going to offer me the job?” Focus your mind on that, and push out other concerns, nerves, and distractions.
3. As the meeting takes place, wait for your unconscious to let you know what the answer is. At first, your unconscious will only whisper its information to you, and it will do that slowly. You'll be uncertain about what it's telling you. But as you practice it, the answers will come faster and more clearly. People who say they have a strong “gut instinct” or “good intuition” are already listening to the messages that their unconscious minds are sending them. The point is that anyone can learn to develop this sense, just like a muscle. It takes practice, and you must go through each of the three steps.
With time, you’ll develop this ability to pose questions to your unconscious mind and get the answers back more and more clearly and quickly. Until you have the expertise, don’t bet on an inside straight.
Next time I’ll talk about how to manage your own body language, a trickier chore.
“Is body language really necessary?” A frustrated executive asked me that once. He had his hands full with learning his talk, coping with the technology, and, well, picking out his tie. His question was really, “Do I have to think consciously about my audience’s body language – and my own – with everything else I have to do to deliver a great speech to that audience? It’s just too much to worry about!”
My counter-intuitive answer is no. Let me explain. You shouldn’t think consciously about other people’s body language or your own, under most circumstances – it’s a very inefficient way to use your conscious mind. You should think unconsciously about body language, however – in fact, you can’t help it. Your mind will do that anyway. You might as well make use of it.
The conscious mind can handle something like 40 bits of information a second. That’s tiny. Your unconscious mind, which is far bigger, handles something like 11 million bits of information per second. That’s more like it. That’s enough to monitor yourself and your surroundings, check the body language of everyone else in the room, and still keep an eye out for the errant shoe that might be flying in your direction.
All those books on body language that tell you to steeple your hands together because it’s intimidating, or (men) to hook your thumbs in your belt because it’s irresistible to women, or to point your feet toward someone you like are missing the point, for several reasons. First of all, we pick up on inconsistent body language with those powerful unconscious brains. So, if you’re steepling your hands, but the rest of your body is saying, “I’m a schmuck!” guess what message will come through to everyone else’s unconscious mind?
Second, body language is multi-determined. That means there can be many reasons for a gesture or a stance. Adopting a particular one risks signaling a meaning different from the one you mean, especially if you’re thinking unconsciously about something else.
And finally, thinking consciously about your body language will slow you down, causing your body language to look fake or insincere to your audience’s unconscious mind, which is faster to pick up information than the conscious mind.
And, of course, because the conscious mind is so limited in its capacity, trying to drive body language with it will cause it to overload quickly, like my executive did. So instead turn over your body language chores – monitoring your own and everyone else’s -- to your unconscious mind, which is up to the task. In following blogs, I’ll discuss exactly how to do that.
President Obama gave an interview to conservative Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly before the Super Bowl last night, and the interview was more revealing of O'Reilly than the President.
O'Reilly began with an emotional thank you to the President for the government's help in protecting a couple of newspeople that "got roughed up in Cairo." That was as friendly as O'Reilly got, until the final thank you. From there it was on to Mubarak and Egypt and the President and the commentator were off and running.
O'Reilly's questions were often statements and those included too many cheap shots like, "Right. He's done the bad things," about Mubarak's partnership with the US. Of course, that partnership has gone on for 30 years, through both Republican and Democratic presidents, and for O'Reilly to begin criticizing Mubarak now is simply too easy. Now that all eyes are focused on Egypt, O'Reilly is impatient for its dictator to go. Man the barricades, and then we'll talk, Bill.
Moreover, first he said, "But the longer he (Mubarak) stays in, the more people are going to die." A heartbeat later, it was "I'm just worried that he might go off the reservation." You can't have it both ways, Bill.
Next up was the health care debate, and here a pattern was set of O'Reilly throwing a question-statement at the President and not allowing him to answer, but rather interrupting him before he'd finished and then getting the last word in before moving on to the next topic. The result was that O'Reilly looked defensive and tense, as if he were afraid he was not up to sparring with the President. The President, on the other hand, was relaxed and handled O'Reilly with ease and assurance.
O'Reilly's body language was oddly off-kilter as well. He was leaning to one side, as if off-balance, and his mouth was set in a lop-sided half-smile, half-sneer which increased the sense that he was not a happy camper. In contrast, President Obama was slouched comfortably in his chair, he smiled often, and his demeanor was easy.
The President even invited O'Reilly to the Super Bowl party at the White House, and O'Reilly's response was a suprisingly ungracious "I don't want to ruin the party for you guys." I don't know about you, but where I was brought up, when someone invites you to a party, you either accept or decline with thanks.
What did you think about the interview? Is O'Reilly usually so easily thrown off by an interviewee? Why is it so difficult for him to sustain a real argument as opposed to just hurling verbal brickbats? And where did he learn his manners?
Of course, I’m envious. I wish I’d thought of the title, The Naked Presenter. It’s attention getting. It got your attention, or you wouldn’t be reading this. My only consolation is that Garr Reynolds and I agree on most issues around creating and delivering effective presentations. Where I give science-based reasons for my recommendations, Garr Reynolds gives reasons based mostly in Japanese culture. Very cool. Along with his earlier books, Presentation Zen, and Presentation Zen Design, The Naked Presenter is a beautifully designed book with a series of elegant insights into how to present effectively. Following are 5 of the best lessons from the new book.
1. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Garr recommends rehearsing at least 4 or 5 times. He talks about lessons from the bamboo trees in the Japanese forest. Bamboo bends, it doesn’t break. It’s “always ready.” It grows continually. These are the qualities that people who are adequately rehearsed can emulate, because they don’t have to focus exclusively on what comes next, trying to remember the content of the speech. Rather, they can focus on the moment, and respond according to what happens, flexible and easy with their content. Your body language always signals the state of your psyche to the audience (here’s where the science comes in). If you’re doing something for the first time, your body will inevitably telegraph that to the audience. If you’re practiced, you can achieve a level of comfort that will allow you to bond more easily with the audience.
2. The audience is on your side; it’s yourself that you have to conquer. Garr’s insight from Budo, or the general term for martial arts in Japan, is that one’s greatest enemy is oneself. Public speakers also face that irony every time they get up to speak. If you realize that a speech is not about you, the speaker, but about the audience, you will be energized by the exchange with that audience. If you think the speech is about you, it will always feel like hard work. In terms of the science, if you open yourself to the mirror neurons of the audience, you will feed off their (positive) emotions, and connect with them. If you focus on your own nervousness, you’ll have a miserable time.
3. Never, ever run long. Garr invokes the Japanese idea of Hara Hachi Bu, which means “eat only until 80 percent full.” Come to think of it, my grandmother used to tell me that, but she also used to tell me, on other days, “eat what’s on your plate – there are children starving in Africa.” Anyway, it’s a universal truth that no one ever protested that a speech ended early, but just about everyone is offended when a speech goes long. I once had the enormous privilege of attending a private seminar with Ted Sorenson, President Kennedy’s speechwriter, about the writing of his inaugural address, the Cuban missile crisis, and other matters. Sorenson warmed to his theme and ran 90 minutes over, and some members of the audience were growing restive, despite the historic topics that were being discussed by one who had witnessed them. I would have stayed until dawn, but the point is that even Ted Sorenson talking about Kennedy shouldn’t go on forever.
4. Don’t be defensive. Here, it’s Akido, the gentle Japanese martial art of leveraging your opponent, that comes into play. Stay interested in the truth, Garr advises, rather than winning or losing. If you face aggressive or hostile questioning, don’t become hostile back; you’ll only increase the aggressiveness in the room. Instead, breathe deeply and stay cool. What the questioner usually wants is to be acknowledged, and I’ve found myself and working with clients, that if you can simply reflect and acknowledge the passion in the question, the hostility goes away. Instinct pushes one to back up and become defensive, but the better response is to move toward the hostile question and embrace the feeling.
5. Keep it simple by presenting naked. Garr means a number of things with his deliberately provocative title. He means be simple, be honest and direct, and keep it real. He means keep your visual aids to a minimum, and when you do use visuals, keep them stripped down, unadorned, and elegant in the Japanese style. This is great advice, and I would only add that honesty begins with getting clear about how you feel emotionally about your material. It’s essential to have a strong emotional connection to your presentation, otherwise you can’t begin to be successful with it. So find the emotional core of your talk, the part that is important to you, and work out from there.
I recommend all of Garr’s books highly. They’re elegant, spare, and useful texts on presenting and slide design that should be in every public speaker’s library.
I get asked all the time about the best ways to structure a speech. The answer is that it depends on what you’re talking about. Here are 5 quick ways to structure a speech that will get you from blank computer screen to presentation in no time.
1. When you’re persuading an audience . . . use the Problem-Solution Structure. Since I believe that the opportunity to persuade an audience is just about the only good reason to go to all the trouble to give a speech, the Problem-Solution structure is my favorite. Begin by framing the problem at a high level, in 1 -3 minutes. Then go into the problem in depth, making both intellectual and emotional arguments for the severity of the problem. Assuming an hour-long speech, you should spend 15-20 minutes in the problem. Then, give the solution, including the benefits of it to the audience. Finally, give the audience something to do at the end – an action step, something simple and relevant to the solution.
2. When you’re debating a particularly contentious subject . . . use the Residues Method. If the subject has strong partisans on both – or more – sides of the issue, then use this method, which is a variant of the Problem-Solution structure. Here, you frame the problem quickly and then explore it in more depth. Then, you tackle the possible solutions of your opponents. You do this in a real, thoughtful way, first presenting the pro side of the solution, and then giving one or 2 reasons why you think it won’t work. Do this for each of the other established positions. Don’t play ‘straw man’ games; give these positions real credit, as if you believed them. Then, once you’ve discussed all the other alternatives, and the problems with them, give your own. It’s the residue, or the one that’s left when all the others have been shot down.
3. When you’ve got a story to tell . . . use the Classic Story Structure. Let’s say you’re talking about your new company, or a new product, and you want to enliven the description with some narrative. Begin by describing the basic situation giving only the relevant detail, and introducing the hero (if there is one) in quick brush strokes. Next, introduce a complication – a rival, a new marketplace entrant, and so on. Finally, resolve the crisis that follows from the complication.
4. When you’ve got a history to relate . . . use the Chronological Structure. What happens next? Is the natural response of someone listening to an interesting history. The key word is ‘interesting’; I’m not a big fan of chronological storytelling unless it’s compelling because it’s inherently interesting. Otherwise, you want to use the Classic Story Structure. A variant of this method is to begin at the end of something, with a startling result, and then circle back to tell the beginning – how we got to where we are. That’s interesting if the stakes are high and everyone’s fascinated by the end result. If you were telling the story of Facebook, for example, you might start with the end – billionaires, fabulous success, and a lawsuit – and then go back to the beginning to see how everyone ended up there. You’d have the plot of The Social Network.
5. When you’ve got a product to demonstrate . . . use the Demonstration Structure. This is what Steve Jobs does better than almost anyone else. First talk about the why – why the product is amazing, why it’s needed, what problems it solves for people, and so on, and then demo the actual product in all its glory. The exact form the demo takes will of course depend on the product, but make sure it works and don’t get bogged down in the details. Just show it doing something really cool for the audience, and then hint at all the other things it could do. Leave ‘em wanting more.
These 5 structures should cover most of the situations in which you find yourself speaking. Each of these structures can be enlivened with brief examples, stories, and factoids along the way. Specificity is the stuff of life in public speaking – but only when used sparingly. Too much detail and any good structure immediately becomes deadly. A speech is not a good way to convey information. It is a good way to persuade, to move your audience to action, and to change the world.
