041: Developing a Powerful Presence with Dr. Nick Morgan

Pete Mockaitis

Nick, thank you so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast!

Dr. Nick Morgan

It’s a pleasure, Pete. Thanks for having me on your show.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, yes well I’m so pumped up. I’ve been a big fan for a long time and it may be a fun way to to set the stage here: might be… could you share a story of some your speech communication work where you had a client and you saw like an extraordinary transformation in terms of kind of before and after, and what made the difference?

Dr. Nick Morgan

Yes, sure. I worked only recently with a consultant who was speaking for the first time to about four thousand people. She had spoken before to small audiences, and was used to working with intimate groups in workshops on sort of an all-day basis. But this was a keynote to four thousand people, a very different kind of experience. You have to come out strong and you only get an hour and you have to reach all four thousand people, so she was very nervous about it.

Her affect was very minimal. She was successful as a consultant really because she projected calm, and she made her clients feel like whatever problems they were facing they could surmount them because she projected that sense of command and calm and being at ease. And that’s a great thing to do in a consulting discussion, but in front of four thousand people, as good as calm is, it’s just not great. You need to entertain those people. And that’s one of the interesting things about communications. We say always nowadays that you need to have a conversation with your audience whether it’s twenty people or two thousand people. But the fact remains that it is a slightly different kind of conversation if it’s twenty people or if it’s many thousands of people, and so I worked with her to figure out how we take that air of calm that she projected and turn it into something that was higher energy, without fundamentally altering her nature.

You don’t want to get somebody pretending to be someone they’re not. She was no Mick Jagger, she wasn’t going to be. There was no point having her come out in a jumpsuit and shout ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’, that just wasn’t gonna work. So we had to find another way to do it, and what we ended up working on was some body language. There are ways that you can signal energy very subtly with body language that don’t fundamentally change your own human nature, but allow you to signal to the audience that you’re there with a good deal of intensity and passion. And so we had her using her hands in ways that were very strong and powerful, and she was able to take that kind of coaching. For some people it’s very hard for them to think about their bodies as they’re speaking in public, but she was one who could. And that turned out to be easier for her than trying to change her nature and and trying to turn her into someone who was really peppy. So it was a great success.

Pete Mockaitis

Well it is a great story, and now you got me curious: what are some of the key things you can do with your hands that can convey that extra energy?

Dr. Nick Morgan

One of the things you can do, and I mentioned a Mick Jagger deliberately, if you’ve ever seen him do a show, he keeps his hands over his head – high over his head – almost the entire show. And he’s always pumping his fists and waving at the crowd. The higher we raise our hands the more energy we signal to the audience we’re putting out.

Now, Mick Jagger, we’re talking pop music and so hands way over the head would be appropriate because it’s high energy, fast tempo, the Rolling Stones are going at it the entire time. Now, my speaker couldn’t come out with their hands over her head and she didn’t have a musical accompaniment, so we had a temper that. She had to keep her hands more at shoulder height. But the difference between that and the way people normally place their hands when they’re speaking signals a very different energy level, and it works a beautifully. Then we say halfway through she got spontaneous applause for one of the comments she made, and that’s when she knew that she had that audience in the palm of her hand, or the palm of her raised hands.

Pete Mockaitis

Well that is perfect. Thank you. Well, now I’d love to hear a little bit: So the top transformative take away I got from your book Give Your Speech, Change the World was that a speech is a journey from ‘why’ to ‘how’, because I often skipped the why and went right to the how, because I’m into the how. You know the podcast called How to be Awesome at Your Job, I like that kind of thing. And so it really a reshaped the way I think about speaking. Could you elaborate for our listeners, what is that principle about, and how does that come to life?

Dr. Nick Morgan

Absolutely. The thing about audiences is they don’t care about you as much as you care about them, as a speaker. You’re of course very interested in succeeding in front of that audience, but from their point of view they’re asking initially why am I here? Why should I care? Why does this matter? And not in a hostile way, but because they want it to be successful. They want to know, why am I here? What are we gonna get out of this hour that we’re gonna spend together, or whatever the length of the session is.

And so if you answer that that ‘why’ question for them early on, then they’re happy bunnies. They’ve settled in their chairs in an attentive way and then you can move on once you’ve taken them through the why and you’ve presented the issue that you’re talking about. Then you can take them into the how, and I can give you a quick example. If you walked out in front of an audience and said straight from the top something like, “There is enough food produced in the world to feed every man, woman and children on the planet every single day, and yet every single day thousands of children die in Africa from malnutrition. What’s wrong with that?”

Now right away that audience would know why they were there. They were there to discuss the issue of of malnutrition and food distribution and they would be oriented and so they would listen to the right kinds of things, and so they would immediately be ready to make that transition from the why to the how. You don’t always need to do it that abruptly, or with that direct a statement, but something like that needs to happen early on in the talk in order to let your audience know why they’re there.

Pete Mockaitis

I love that example, and sure enough you grab my attention right from the get go. Could you maybe give us the counter-example of what would be a weaker start to that speech?

Dr. Nick Morgan

Going back to my consultant example, consultants often speaking to audiences, they want to jump right into their expertise and so they tend to do something in the form of it an executive summary. And that executive summary says something like ‘here’s what’s wrong with your company, and for the free of a hundred million dollars we’ll fix it’.

And what the executives who are listening to that, while they appreciate no doubt having their time saved, with the executive summary what they hear is, ‘You’re gonna have to write me a giant check and I don’t know why’, and so they immediately say no. So that’s an example of how not to do it, jumping right into your expertise or your solution or your way of proceeding.

Now the other kinds of mistakes that speakers make, there are three of them that I see over and over and over again. The first one is to say, “Let me begin by telling you a little bit about myself.” And so they introduced themselves or their company or their products and again the audience doesn’t care about that. They want to know why they’re there, they don’t care as much about you as you do about them. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing, and this may surprise some people, is speakers often start with an agenda. “Let me tell you what I’m going to tell you.” I think agendas used to work a couple of decades ago, but now what you see, and I’ve observed this behavior over and over again going to conferences, as soon as the speaker says “Let me tell you about the agenda, what I’m going to say without actually saying anything,” the audience goes to their cellphones kind of surreptitiously because they’re thinking to themselves, ‘great, I can get one more email done or one more text message sent before he actually starts talking about what he’s going to talk about.’ And they see that as a time waster. I absolutely believe that agendas are important if you have a group for a whole day, if you’re leading a workshop or something like that, they deserve to know what’s in store for them for an entire day. But we’re talking an hour keynote, we can live through that without knowing what the specific roadmap is. We don’t need to know every fifteen minutes of what what you’re going to say so just jump right in.

And then the third mistake that speakers make all the time, is they do what I call throat clearing. They’ll say something like, “Well it’s great to be here! Anybody here from the Buch?” And “How about the rainstorm last night? Boy, it woke me up so I’m a little short on sleep today,” and they’re just sort of chattering away without really beginning or telling the audience why they’re there. And when I charge speakers with that, and I say, “cut that kind of thing out,” they say, “Oh no I’m I’m establishing a rapport with the audience.” But in fact if you dig a little bit into that, you see they’re not establishing rapport with the audience. They’re just trying to make themselves comfortable, and public speaking isn’t about being instantly comfortable. That’s not your job. Your job is to jump right in and tell that audience something they don’t know and that they’re interested in finding more about.

Pete Mockaitis

I like that tough love there. So we start with a strong ‘why’ and none of the other distractions, whether that would be an agenda or throat clearing type stuff, and so the ‘why’ might sound like the benefit or the transformation you’re gonna get when we’re all done here. What are some other kind of key ‘why’s that are great starting points?

Dr. Nick Morgan

Well you might tell the audience a story. I often give speeches on body language and I’ll start with the story of the time I suffered a traumatic brain injury and died. And that really gets the audience’s attention.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, yeah.

Dr. Nick Morgan

And they say, “Oh, how did you die? How are you still here?” And I tell the story. “Well I only died for fifteen minutes but what happened as a result of that was that for a period of about a year I could no longer automatically read body language in the way that most people can.  

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, wow.

Dr. Nick Morgan

In that, if you walk into a room and a loved one or friend or colleague is in the room and that person is furious or happy or very excited about something, you can pick up that vibe pretty quickly. You don’t think about it consciously. You know the person and you just know what they’re indicating with their emotions. And I’d lost that ability. Something about the brain injury had caused me to lose that. And so I had to train myself consciously to understand body language to get it back, and so when I tell that story, people are then engaged. And I’ll say that’s why I’m interested in body language and that’s why I’m here today talking to you about it, and that’s enough to get people going, to let them know why they’re there without sort of giving away the whole game, without telling them all the things that I’m going to tell them.  So a story like that can engage people, make them interested, and yet not give the whole game away.

Pete Mockaitis

Well that’s fun. And speaking of body language, I’d like to transition now a bit to talk about your latest book, Power Cues. And so you lay out seven of those cues that I’m sure we don’t have time to to cover much depth on those, but could you give us an overview of where some of the big power cues to watch out for, and maybe in particular do some demo on vocal intonation?

Dr. Nick Morgan

Yeah, absolutely. So the first several power cues are all about figuring out your own body language history and how that affects the way you walk into a room, or the way you stand, or the way you present yourself to other people when you meet them for the first time. What happens to us once we get past about age – let’s say – eighteen is we start to carry our history around. The history of our great moments and our not so great moments. And if we’re confident we tend to bake that into our muscles, and so we walked naturally in a confident way. And if we lack confidence or if we’re shy or if we’ve suffered a lot of disappointment along the way, we will tend to carry that in our bodies too.

And so the first set of power cues is about finding out what what’s your body language history, what you’re presenting to the world, and then what can you do about that. Is that the persona that you want the world to see in these important moments? Like when you’re giving a speech, or going for a job interview, or asking for a raise, or all those kind of key moments in our professional lives. When we want to show up at our best, are you showing up at your best? And so the book Power Cues goes into how you can modify your body language. Think about it in a way that allows you to show up at your best.

Pete Mockaitis

So body language, got it.

Dr. Nick Morgan

Yeah, those are the first several, and then that the fourth power cue you mentioned, the voice. The fourth power cue is all about the voice. And there’s some extraordinary research that suggests that the voice is much more powerful, much more important than we’ve realized in determining leadership. It turns out we respond to aspects of the voice that we’re not consciously aware of. There are undertones in every voice that allows us to tell one voice from another, and so when you have somebody who has a very strong voice, and I always use the example of former president Ronald Reagan because everybody knows he had a great sort of communicating voice, a very rich and resonant and so he sounded like a president.

And so that’s just a good example to give you a sense of what I mean. When you hear a voice like that, then that voice inspires a leadership and followership in people. It takes charge of the room. And the alternative is a voice that’s that’s pitched at a higher place than it should be. For example, when somebody gets frightened or nervous, the voice goes up in pitch. So if I were suddenly terrified of Pete, if suddenly I got terrified doing this podcast, my voice might go up like this, and I might go, “Hey Pete, this is scary!”. My voice might go up in pitch. That would signal to you obviously and intuitively that I was frightened or anxious about something.

And what happens is in a subtler way, when we don’t feel in charge, when we don’t feel like we’re a leader in the room, our voices tighten up just a little bit and they rise just a tiny bit in pitch. Not enough for us to be consciously aware of it, but enough for everybody in the room to be unconsciously aware and decide, ‘hey that person isn’t a leader’. So this research tends to show, very powerfully, it’s important to get control of your voice and figure out where it is that if that you’re pitching it, and to become aware of are you conveying stress in your voice?

Because we humans are incredibly adept at picking out tension in other people’s voices, and for sort of obvious survival reasons. And as I say, the simple way to understand this is imagine some loved one is suddenly walking across the street and into the path of an oncoming car and you panic and you shout out, “Watch out!” Your voice will go up, wouldn’t it? It would not go down, it would not go down, it would not say, “watch out…” because there is danger. Instead, it will go up in pitch, so we intuitively we get this, but as I say the subtle kind of leadership when people are sitting around a conference table talking is a very different sort of thing, and people need to become aware of that, because they can undercut themselves without being consciously aware.

Pete Mockaitis

So if I want to convey power and seem confident, I want to ensure that my pitch doesn’t rise a little bit because I’m scared a smidge, and so any best practices for summoning that, or pulling that off with consistency?

Dr. Nick Morgan

Yes, I urge everybody to listen to Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech because he is the master of pitch in voice, and what he does is he does allow his voice to go up because that only she can show fear, but it also shows passion, and passion is important in leadership. So he says “I have a dream!” in his voice goes up and then comes down and it comes down into the authoritative tone that we need to hear from him to know is a leader. He doesn’t say “I have a dream?” If he had given that speech saying “I have a dream?”, nobody would have remembered it and nobody would have followed him, but because he said “I have a dream!” and his voice came down at the end, he signaled both passion with the higher pitch at the beginning of the phrase, and then and then authority and strength with the lower pitch at the end of the phrase. And so you need to start thinking of your voice as almost a musical instrument to convey both passion, both caring, and authority and leadership.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, this makes me feel better about the money I’m spending on voice lessons, thank you.

Dr. Nick Morgan

Excellent! Everybody should spend money on voice lessons, and I say that, I’m not a voice teacher per se so I’m not to make any money from that recommendation. But everybody should.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, well that’s cool. Anything else we should know about intonation, in terms of maybe different situations call for different intonations? We talked about passion, we talked about fear, anything else that comes to mind?

Dr. Nick Morgan

Well, sure. The advanced level then is to start getting control of your pacing and your pauses and your variety because when you’re under stress, you tend to speak in more of a monotone, and you tend to speed up a little bit because you’re nervous. And you tend to say everything at the same rate, at the same pitch, and just talking talking talking without much variety.

It sort of gets hard to understand, and it gets a bit boring after awhile because it’s always at the same pitch, always at the same speed, and so part of developing a powerful voice is learning to pause…   and let those moments set for a minute. Let a little anticipation build. And then to vary the pitch, to go up sometimes when you say, “Hey! This is really exciting! Wouldn’t it be great if we could do this?”, and then bring your voice down again. So it’s about putting music into your voice as well as building pauses and variety and as as well as thinking about the pitch.

Pete Mockaitis

I love that, and I went to a session with a speech coach once with my agency, campus speak for college folks. And he had an interesting point in he said that, ‘when you whisper, you become inspirational’. And I thought you know that’s kind of true, but the same time I feel like when you whisper you also sometimes sound creepy. What’s your take on whispering?

Dr. Nick Morgan

A little whispering goes a long way. I would only use it very carefully in certain situations. I recently heard a commencement speech, and the entire speech was done this kind of agonized whisper. It was at first fascinating and sort of electrifying, and then after a couple minutes it just got agonizing. You were afraid that the poor fellow was gonna die, you just started feeling sorry for him, and then pretty soon you had to tune out. Because, we can’t take a voice like that at a fever pitch, without break. And so a little of that goes a long way, it’s very very intense and and you just don’t wanna listen to ten minutes of this, Pete. It would drive you nuts.

Pete Mockaitis

That is how I feel about the TV series Scandal. Apologies for people who love the show Scandal , but it feels to me like the whole script were written in capital letters in bold, and I can’t take it after awhile.

Dr. Nick Morgan

It’s like that show, it was great in the first season or two, 24. I remember watching that back in the day, and Jack Bauer would come out of every ten seconds it seemed like and shout that “We’ve got to do this now!” and “This has to happen now!”, and it was really exciting until you realize that it was a verbal tic after awhile. And there can only be so many things that can happen now.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, oh this is fun. So now, to move on a bit, what are some of the most frequently occurring, I guess, weaknesses or Achilles heels, if you will, when it comes to the speakers that come across your pathway?

Dr. Nick Morgan

Well, one of the one of the classic ones that everybody has to unlearn is the issue that’s brought about because of the fight or flight syndrome, the adrenaline that goes through your system when you get ready give a speech, and virtually everybody experiences that adrenaline, which means you’re a bit nervous. And those symptoms that let you know that you’re nervous are uncomfortable. Your heart rate speeds up, and maybe you feel warm, maybe you feel flushed. Your palms get clammy. There’s a whole series of symptoms, you know what they are, and that they don’t feel great, and so you try to try to get rid of them.

And people do two things unconsciously to try to shed that tension, and both of them are wrong. Both of them are less than optimal in speaking situations. So one of them is what we call ‘happy feet’, and that’s where you just start pacing all over the stage. Now a little bit of movement is good, but too much pacing and the audience starts to get annoyed with you after awhile, because you’re not going anywhere. You’re just going around and around and in no direction. In circles, in essence. And so that so that gets irritating and distracting for the audience, it’s like a verbal tic.

But the energy has to come out somewhere, and so the other place that comes out is in your hands. You’re not aware of it, you don’t think you’ve done it, but you have, which is you clutch your hands nervously in front of your stomach. And the reason you do that is the fight or flight syndrome. You’re bringing your hands up in front of your stomach in order to be able to fight. And so what you do is you signal unconsciously. It’s a very low level signal, but nonetheless you’re signaling hostility to the audience unconsciously.

And the audience picks up, not of the conscious level, but unconsciously it picks up that slight bit of hostility that’s in your stance. And you can imagine what that does for communication. How receptive are we gonna be to your speech if we’re feeling like you’re acting in a slightly hostile manner? Immediately it makes us start to tune out, and it’s one reason why so many speeches are so mediocre. Because that body language is sloppy and people are defensive, and they’re in this fight or flight stance without being aware of it. They’re not forming fists, and they’re not standing like a prize-fighter, they’re not that silly. They’re aware that that’s not good, so they may even be smiling, but their hands unconsciously have that low level of sort of hostile intent, and that a really interferes with their ability to connect with the audience. So those are the two most common mistakes that I see, or issues that I see over and over again.  

Pete Mockaitis

And speaking of common issues, I know that one massive pet peeve, it sure comes through in your blog posts, is when people are showing some slides, a Powerpoint, a key note, and the font size isn’t quite up to par, and they say, “I know you can’t see this…” What are some other just real quick simple things that folks need to to start or stop doing to take things up a notch?

Dr. Nick Morgan

Oh, sure. Well, thinking along the same lines and slides, it’s people who argue with the slides they’ll put up a sea of numbers and they’ll say, “Well, you can’t see this, but in buried in the middle of this slide is the important numbers”. So one thing you can do is just blow that single number up take all the other numbers out. In the same way, find what’s the important point on the particular slide, and cut out all the other words. Of course, you really want to up your game and remove as many words as possible and start using photographs, and preferably real photographs not stock photographs. We don’t want the happy people around the conference table. How many times did we see that shot? There are a number of ways you can up your game on your slides, and one of them is simply a using fewer of them. Ask yourself, do I really need a slide here? Some people use it as a crutch, and it’s really more a speaker outline of for the benefit of the speaker than it is for the audience.

The real truth about slides is that they are a distraction to the audience and – plenty of research on this – it turns out that humans don’t multitask very well. We know this now, and so when you’re asking an audience to look at you and to look at slides, that’s asking them to multi task. So there’s what we call the switching loss, when you switch from one to the other, from you to the slides, from slides to you. You lose some information. You don’t hear the last word that you said, or you don’t quite get the whole intent of the slide, and so if you’re going to use slides then use them deliberately to say, “Now look at this slide, because it sure says something that you need to see”. I mean, you need to point to the slide, and then give people a few seconds to take in the slide  and then bring the attention back to you. So that’s just a way of using slides that doesn’t actually undercut your effort to communicate. That’s just a simple way to begin to raise your game.

Pete Mockaitis

And that’s so interesting. Thinking about the multi-tasking distraction element, would you recommend that from time to time you just push in that, you know, cut to black on the slide remote so that there’s there’s less of that?

Dr. Nick Morgan

Yeah, absolutely. When I work with a speaker, the conversation we always have is we say, “Let’s make each slide earn its place”. It has to really add something. There has to be something powerful about the picture that is just much harder to describe in words. And so the slides all earn their places, and it means that in the course of the hour, there’s going to be ten minutes here and ten minutes there where you don’t really need a slide, then let’s put a black one in, so from the audience’s point of view the the distraction just goes away. You don’t just have wallpaper up there, which they’re not sure they should look at or not. And they can focus on you.

Most people, when they’re trying to decode what other people are telling them, when we’re trying to get a message across to someone, we look to the human face first to understand what it is that you intend. What you mean. Are you saying what you’re saying with a smile? Do you have a serious expression on your face? We look to the the human face first and foremost to decode what other people are telling us and understand what other people are telling us, and so letting your slides go to black when you don’t absolutely need a slide is a good way of putting the attention of the audience back where it should be, which is on you and your face.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, and so now maybe, flipping it a little bit: What are some things my buddy and speaking mentor Mawi Asgedom, from episode one, who first introduced me to your book, so thanks to him, he wanted me to ask, what is something that professional or great speakers should do to continue improving on refining their game?

Dr. Nick Morgan

Well, it almost goes without saying, maybe it’s obvious, maybe it isn’t, that you should study great speakers. Not with an eye to copying them, but with an eye to taking from them what they do well and making it your own, because you need to develop your own voice, your own style your own unique persona. But you can learn from the greats. For example, if you study, as I mentioned, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream speech”, that’s a fantastic speech. The second half of it was ad libbed in front of three hundred thousand people. It’s an extraordinary achievement that whole section on “I have a dream” was an ad lib section because he felt he wasn’t connecting with the audience sufficiently with the written part of the text. And yet he uses that vocal intonation that I talked about with this voice coming down at the end of each phrase to show that he is in control. He is an authority all the way through. Even though he’s making it up as he goes along, that’s extraordinary, the power of that speech. So you can learn from that.

Similarly, the most viewed Ted talk of all time I think is still Sir Ken Robinson’s “Why schools killed creativity” speech. And he uses that same arc in his voice, it’s just much subtler because he’s not talking to three hundred thousand people. But if you listen carefully to that voice, you’ll hear his pitch goes down slightly at the end of each sentence too, which is how he conveys complete authority about what he’s talking about. And when you do that, you signal to the audience that ‘Hey, you’re in good hands here.’ We’ve all had the experience of of talking to somebody who says everything as if it was a question, like, “It’s really great to be here today? And My name is Nick? And it’s a pleasure to talk with you, Pete? And I hope we have a good discussion today?” and a little bit of that, you just ready to ring the neck of the person who’s talking to you, right? But we hear people talk like that all the time, and it comes from a nervousness perhaps, and also partly desire to get approval or to get agreement from everybody else in the room, and it’s very irritating so don’t do it.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, and my final question before we shift gears into the fast favorites section is, do any kind of creative tactics or technologies leap to mind in terms of looking to boost the engagement, the follow through, the accountability of what’s happening in a speech? So beyond just us talkin’, but gettin’ folks doing some things, or in putting some things in technology… What are some of the the coolest ways you’ve seen to boost the engagement, follow-through and accountability?

Dr. Nick Morgan

Yeah, I love that question because there are all kinds of new ways that are now developing that we’re seeing. I mean, for a long time, speakers have had the option of being interactive with the audience, get the audience to do something. If I tell you something, you’ll remember it in one way, but if I get you doing something, you’ll remember it much more powerfully. So audience interactivity is always a way to increase engagement and retention, and is very important, even in a huge keynote speech situation, you can still do some interactive things. But what’s happening now thanks to technology is, we have the option of, say you’re going to give a keynote speech, you could send out a little twenty-second or thirty-second video beforehand to all the people who are gonna be there, who were signed up for the event, or who are at the company where you’re going to speak, and you get their emails from HR there at the company. Send out the the little video and that’s a way of of peaking people’s curiosity and saying, “Hey, I’m really looking forward to chatting with you”.

We’re seeing what we call a gamification where people do little mini contests, and they ask a couple questions about what’s going to happen in the speech, and they maybe even offer a prize to the person who can answer that question correctly. It’s kind of a fun and playful way of peaking people’s curiosity and interest before the speech. And then you can do the same in follow-up. You can ask them questions, you can get feedback, you can continue the discussion in all sorts of ways now thanks to technology, again with video but also with simple text messaging and email and that sort of thing. So there are all kinds of ways now to increase the engagement of your audience both before and after the speech, as well as during.

Pete Mockaitis

Beautiful, thank you. So now, you tell me, is anything else you wanna make sure that you get out there before we kind of shift gears and go into the rapid fire fast faves segment?

Dr. Nick Morgan

Well, we talked a lot about body language, so I would just say that the whole point of body language is to be in service to the content. One of the big misunderstandings out there, and I feel it’s important because I’m somebody who talks about body language a lot, so I feel it’s important to say this. One of the big misunderstandings out there is, it’s not just all about the body language. The whole point is to get your body language effectively supporting your content so that you can make a point. Humans get together to communicate; they don’t get together to share body language per se. They get together to talk to each other about stuff that matters to them, and so the reason that you want to work on the body language, always remember, is put it in service and effective service to your content, to what you’re passionate about, to the story you’re trying to tell.

Pete Mockaitis

Alright, would you kick us off by sharing what’s a favorite quote of yours? Something that inspires you again and again.

Dr. Nick Morgan

“The only reason to give a speech is to change the world.” (-JFK)

Pete Mockaitis

Alright. And how about a favorite study or piece of research?

Dr. Nick Morgan

Well, I love the famous, or infamous, Mehrabien research, which found, and it gets misquoted all the time, but what it found was that when body language and content are at odds with one another, we always believe the body language. And so the body language always trumps the content, and what that means is, take a very simple example: If you go home today, and

your spouse is angry at you for some reason, you ask her how she is, and she says, “fine”. But she’s got her arms crossed, she’s got a scowl on her face and you hear a tone in the word ‘fine’, then you know she’s not fine. But we humans do that all the time, grownups especially, because we’re used to pretending that were fine when we’re not, and in telling a little white lies and things like that, and so we get adept at reading people’s body language to figure out what they’re really saying. And the Mehrabien study really kicked off the study of unpacking body language, and figure out what it means.

Pete Mockaitis

How about a favorite book?

Dr. Nick Morgan

Well I love, besides my own, I  love for Amy Cuddy’s recent book called Presence.  

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, yeah.

Dr. Nick Morgan

So I recommend that highly to all your listeners. It’s quite funny because both my book, Power Cues, which you were kind enough to mention, published in 2014, and her book Presence published this year, or late 2015, I guess, began with a discussion of our traumatic brain injuries. We both suffered traumatic brain injuries, and then became interested in body language. And when I read her book, that was so freaky to discover that you both have that similar experience that, I’ve just been fascinated by that book ever since. And there’s a lot of good research and recommendations in there for how to improve your presence.

Pete Mockaitis

Well that is fun, and we’re hoping to get her on the show shortly. How about a favorite tool? Was there a hardware software gadget, or something that you find handy?

Dr. Nick Morgan

Yeah, sure. One thing your listeners may not be aware of is that there are a number of good apps out there now that can turn your computer, or even your iPad, or you’re device like an iPad, I should say as to not be giving product recommendations, but there are apps that turns them into teleprompters. And so you can put notes for the speech or the speech itself up on your computer, your teleprompter, or your iPad, so if you’re afraid of of losing your place or forgetting what you’re going to say, you have the security of the notes or the speech there for you. Technology just makes it very easy nowadays to give yourself the support you need so you don’t have to worry about forgetting what you’re gonna say.

Pete Mockaitis

Well that’s handy. Are there any particular apps that you have experience with that you’ve been pleased with?

Dr. Nick Morgan

Sure. The one that I use is called “Teleprompter Plus”. So there are several. I don’t know what the plus means, but I guess it’s just better than the others or something.

Pete Mockaitis

And how about a favorite habit? Is their personal practice of yours that’s boosted your effectiveness?

Dr. Nick Morgan

Yes, I’m so glad you asked that, because this is a pet cause of mine. What we call belly breathing, diaphragmatic breathing, most people when they breeze just let their shoulders up and down, and they breathe very shallow breaths, and it’s especially a curse of modern life because we spend so much of our time sitting. Sitting at desks, sitting on airplanes, sitting in cars, and it’s hard to breathe big deep belly breaths a sitting down. And so I tell everybody stand up, expand your stomach as you breathe in so that you can take a lots of air in. It’s counterintuitive, it’s the opposite the way most people normally breathe, but if you’ve been a singer, or if you’ve done yoga, you’ve practiced this, so you know how to do it. And it’s great for your health, it’s great for the resonance and strength of your voice, and if you want to be a leader, it’s essential for developing a leadership voice.

Pete Mockaitis

How about a best way to find you? If folks wanna learn more about you, should you direct them to your website or Twitter, or where’d you have to go?

Dr. Nick Morgan

The website is probably the easiest way to get a touch of me, just links and contact forms thing on on there so it’s public words, Publicwords.com.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely.   And how about a favorite challenge or parting call to action for those seeking to be more awesome at their jobs.

Dr. Nick Morgan

Yes, ask yourself your personal ‘why’. Figure out why y ou’re doing what you’re doing, why you’re there, why it matters, and be ready to tell people that. Not in a pushy or aggressive way, but just ready to work that into the conversation. It’s surprising how powerful that is for people to hear.

Pete Mockaitis

Well Nick, this is been such a treat. Thank you so much. I wish you tons of luck with public words and all the good stuff you’re doing over there.

Dr. Nick Morgan

Thank you, Pete. It was a real pleasure to chat with you.