Speaking & Presentations Archives - Page 4 of 13 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Joel, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Joel Schwartzberg
Thank you, Pete. It’s my pleasure.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear what you have to say, as well as to hear the tale about your Wheel of Fortune appearance. How did this come about?

Joel Schwartzberg
Well, when you live in Los Angeles and you don’t have a job, you don’t go to unemployment, as most people do, more often you go on to a game show. Why not? This was back in the day, we’re talking about the ‘90s. So, I was out of work at the time, living in Los Angeles, and I just took a chance. Even though I was local, I auditioned, they picked me. And a year and a half later, I was on the show. And, Pete, it was one of the most doomed experiences of my life.

Pete Mockaitis
Doomed?

Joel Schwartzberg
Doomed.

Pete Mockaitis
How so?

Joel Schwartzberg
I did not fare well. I think they do a week’s worth of shows in one day, at least they did, and I was clearly the big loser of the day so much so that they gave me some extra consolation prizes. So, all I took from it was not the $20,000 annuity. I didn’t even know what an annuity was at the time. I just took my memories from it, really. And those served me well, but it was not my finest hour in terms of being a successful contestant.

Pete Mockaitis
So, there is an episode of you but you didn’t do well on it, is that what I’m hearing?

Joel Schwartzberg
That’s basically the bottom line. Right, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. But I want to know then, so we’re talking about The Language of Leadership: How to Engage and Inspire, I’m curious if some of your skills, you think that won you the spot on the audition. What do you think sold them on you?

Joel Schwartzberg
One of the things I have to say, I’m not often asked that question, but one of the things that helped me is, I think, was eye contact. I maintained eye contact with the other competitors as we did sort of rehearsal rounds, I definitely gave eye contact to the people who were in the decision-making role, and I just sort of flooded them with my engagement through my eyes. Now, as we went through, these are things they’re looking for, “Am I going to be mousy or am I going to be confident and assertive? Am I going to ask for vowels in a strong voice or in sort of a small voice?” These are things they’re looking for.

So, as you ask that question, it’s interesting, a lot of the things I talk to my clients and students about are things I employed there that I think, yes, I think they did make a difference in them, ultimately, picking me.

Pete Mockaitis
Decisively buy those vowels, that’s a good takeaway right there. So, let’s sort of zoom out. In your years of working and research looking into how leaders communicate well, what would you say is one of your most surprising or counterintuitive discoveries?

Joel Schwartzberg
My biggest discovery, and this is sort of the bread and butter of what I train, is the concept of making a point. Now, obviously, leaders need to make points but, really, everybody needs to make points not only in our professional life but also in your personal life. We make points to our mother’s-in-law and our children, and to our neighbors.

And what I discovered, after a few years of training public speakers, was that, while they were doing everything right in terms of their gestures, they’re planting their feet, their volume, their articulation, when I asked them, “What point are you trying to make?” they would reply with something that wasn’t a point, which forced me to build a definition of what a point is, as well as a simple test that people can use to find out if they’re making a point or not.

And to be very clear about this, what they thought was their point was actually a theme, or a topic, a notion, a category, a catchphrase. For example, podcasting is not a point. If you asked me what my point is, and I said podcasting, I’m not telling you the value of podcasting, who I’m trying to reach through podcasting, the future of podcasting, how podcasting impacts culture. None of that. So, I’m giving you a theme but I’m not really making my point.

And once I sort of came to that realization, I turned around my training and I wrote this book called Get to the Point! which really helps people understand, A, what a point is and what it is not; B, how to sharpen that point; and, finally, how to champion that point. And that is an imperative for leaders, but it is certainly a benefit for anybody who needs to make a point, which is all of us.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s just a huge learning right there. Let’s dig into it. So, some things that are not a point would be a theme, a category. So, then what is the definition and the test for whether a point is a point or not a point?

Joel Schwartzberg
A strong point is a proposition. I’m sort of putting myself on the line to put something out there and suggest or recommend something to you. And within that, I’m also explicitly conveying the value of it. Now, this gives us sort of an ambiguous idea of what a point is, so let’s take the podcasting example. A topic is podcasting, a theme is communication, a catchphrase is “the power of podcasting,” but a point is, “I believe that podcasting is the most effective way to reach our millennial audience.”

Now, how do we get from one of those to the others? That’s a test that I have in my book that’s very simple. It’s called the “I believe that” test. And I know it’s simple because my daughters, when they were in middle school, they used it. And it goes like this. You take what you believe is your point, and you put the words “I believe that” in front of it. Now, it’s a mild tweaking, if any. What you want to have is a complete sentence, not a fragment, not a run-on, something that will impress your fourth-grade language arts teacher – a complete sentence.

So, if we put that podcasting example into play, “I believe that podcasting…” not a sentence, even “I believe the importance of podcasting…” not a complete sentence. It forces you to say, “I believe that podcasting will enable us to X,” “I believe that podcasting will change the world in these ways.” And that’s where we talk about having a point and sharpening it.

So, I’ve ran this test many, many times for people in nonprofits, for people selling a product, for people in PR, for people running for office, for people interviewing for jobs, and it works the same for each person. You want to make the point so you basically want to make a belief statement that says, “If this happens, then this other thing will result,” “If you hire me, then your environment and your work product will be improved in this way.”

And then, when you use that test, when you have that complete sentence, you’re on your way to making a point. But if you fail that test, you need to go back and reimagine your point so that it can pass that test.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, can you give us some more examples of things that are not a point? I guess what I’m thinking here is I’m thinking about a lot of slide decks. So, back in consulting, we had our headlines at the top of the slide and that was kind of the idea, it’s like, “That headline, it’s about two lines maybe, up to a dozen-ish words, and it should say sort of the point of the slide.” And that was really instilled into us.

And so, it shouldn’t just say, “Revenue over time,” or, “Customer breakdown,” because that is a label of what is on the slide. And so, fair enough, that is what that is but it doesn’t sort of tell you, “What are you trying to tell me about the revenue over time or the customer breakdown?” So, what are some other ways that you see this not working so well in business and professional contexts, like common non-points that come up again and again that need to be improved?

Joel Schwartzberg
There are a lot of settings for it. One of the ones where you’ll see it most obviously is in conferences, “Hey, Pete, what are you talking about today? I’d like to come to your session.” “Oh, I’m talking about podcasting,” or, “I’m talking about income inequality,” or, “I’m talking about Coca-Cola.” Well, you’re not telling me what point you’re going to make. And if you do tell it to me in a form of a point, “I’m going to talk about the ways we can tackle income inequality so that everybody has the same opportunity in America.” You see how that’s more compelling and resonant?

You mentioned another place, and I’m glad you mentioned because even just PowerPoint, and you can get a million recommendations, but the one I never see, which is key to me, is what you said. In the title of a PowerPoint slide, what we’re often seeing is categories: what’s next, background, history, statistics. And then in the example you said, “Yeah, PowerPoint slides can say ‘Our feedback survey’ or it can say, ‘Results of our feedback survey,’ or it can say, ‘Feedback: Our community prefers Coca-Cola.’” Why not put the exact point into the topic or the title page of that PowerPoint?

Another place is in email. People are using subject lines that often read “Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Tuesday” when they’re actually trying to convey a very important point or a very important recommendation for a tactic that the team should take, but it’s submerged under a subject line that is not expressing that point.

So, really, in all settings, whether you’re writing, you’re speaking, you’re creating a video, you’re texting, you’re posting, these all benefit from points. And what I often say in my training is, “Tomorrow morning, when your manager says, ‘All right, let’s go around the room and if you have recommendations or if you have feedback, what happened over the weekend, please share it,’ and people will hem and haw, ‘Well, I think this happened and I don’t know if that should’ve happened,’ why not set yourself up for success by saying, you can say, ‘I believe that if we had done this, we would’ve had more impact on our customers,’ or, ‘I believe that what happened over the weekend was a great example of what happens when we take this approach to our audience.’”

Now, I want to make something clear, Pete. I’m not saying you always need to use the words “I believe that.” It’s merely a test to make sure you’re making a point. However, if you do say “I believe that” you’re putting your reputation behind it so there is value to saying those three words.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so that’s a big idea right there in the book Get to the Point! Let’s talk about your latest, The Language of Leadership. What’s the big idea here?

Joel Schwartzberg
So, the big idea behind The Language of Leadership, it’s really taking the ideas of Get to the Point! and it’s asking, “How can leaders use points to do the two most important things they need to do with their teams? Engage their teams and inspire their teams.” Now, that may seem obvious. Obviously, leaders want to engage and inspire, but those are the only two words I picked. I would’ve preferred one word, but for the purposes of broadness, I wanted those two words.

So, what words didn’t I pick? I didn’t say that leaders want to inform, entertain, impress, graduate. There are a lot of words that some leaders may think they want to do for their audience. But, to me, the two most important are engaging and inspiring, especially inspiring. And one of the biggest places where they don’t do that, because we want to talk about examples where people are just missing the mark, is leaders who think that information on its own inspires.

And we often see this in presentations or in PowerPoints, if I tell you the history, “All right, this is what we did in the past, this is what we’re doing now, this is how many, this is how many people, this is how much we’re going to spend on it. Thank you very much.” There is no point there. They merely thought by merely sharing the information, it would sell itself. And what you’re really doing is putting the burden on the audience to receive a point that was not conveyed when, really, that burden is on you to inspire and make the point. I call these book reports. You’re sharing something but you’re not selling something.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then merely information, like, “This is what happened before and what happens now and what happens in the future…”

Joel Schwartzberg
Right. Details. Data. Right.

Pete Mockaitis
So, a point would be like, “We have made tremendous strides and we’re so excited about what we’re going in the future.”

Joel Schwartzberg
Right. Or, let’s say data, we’re always sharing data and slides. I wrote an article about this for Harvard Business Review. The data, just like a story, storytelling is a big deal also, they share one attribute, and that is they don’t sell themselves. They only sell, and you’re only selling them when you say these words. And, in fact, these words are more important than the data and more important than the story. It’s the point at which you say, “This story demonstrates why we should,” “This story is an example of how we can,” “This data proves that we ought to take these steps.” And people leave that out.

And I have one really good example, if you don’t mind my sharing it. I had a client who created all sorts of collateral material. She created hats and calendars and brochures, and I said, “All right, give me your best pitch. Make your point to me.” And she said, “All right. You see these brochures? Well, they are a special material where they won’t crumple. And I’ll give you your logo in three colors all around it. And you see this hat? This hat, if an elephant stepped on this hat and it won’t crush. And this pen, this pen is made of a special nanotechnology. It’ll only pierce your shirt. It won’t pierce your skin. And I tell you what, I’ll give you three colors on the logo of your pen.”

And she went on and on describing her inventory, and she finished. And I said, “Do you think you made your point?” And she said, “I did. I described each and every piece of my inventory and why each of those pieces were great.” And I said, “That’s okay, but you know what I never heard from you? I never heard you say that if I buy your product, I will be more successful.” And that’s what she was selling, that was her big point but she never said it explicitly. What she was doing was sharing details, giving her inventory.

A good example of this is, also, imagine a book. In the book, there are two things, there’s a table of contents and there are blurbs. The blurbs sell the book. The table of contents just shares the inventory. So, what leaders want to do, what anyone giving a presentation or a speech wants to do, is they want to be the blurbist. They want to sell the idea, not just share it as like a table of contents.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s excellent. And it’s interesting, in the collateral materials example, like, “This pin is great because of that, and this hat is great for that,” I suppose if what the information you wanted was, “Why should I pick you instead of the other penmaker or hatmaker?” then that might be helpful. It’s like, “Oh, okay, the hat is more durable than others, or less likely to pierce flesh with a pen.” But if your question is more like, “Should I buy this at all?” then that doesn’t do the trick, versus if you could say, “We had a client who got these hats, and there are millions of impressions now on Instagram where people are being photographed in these hats which has driven their brand awareness a whole lot.” You’re like, “Oh, wow, that’s cool. I guess people are into hats and photographing themselves.”

Joel Schwartzberg
Exactly. What did the hats enable you to do? What did the service or product, not just what it is, but what it enables you to do? And you talk about, “Sell me this pen,” that’s really the basis of that exercise. The value of the pen is not that it’s blue or has a great cap or has a good design, and we’re using it as an example, but it empowers you to express yourself in ways that have impact. And, at the end of the day, what you often want to ask is, “If my audience can only take away one thing, what would that be? What do I want them to leave with?” And if you can answer that question, then you know what you need to do as the speechmaker or as the conveyer or the communicator.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Okay. Well, so that’s a great perspective right there in terms of not falling for the trap that information alone inspires, really thinking what’s the one key point you want them to be left with and going for it. Can you share with us a couple other key communication best practices and worst practices that really make an impact when we’re trying to engage and inspire?

Joel Schwartzberg
Sure. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is they think more is better. We know from writing, the writers amongst us, in your audience, we know less is more. But what we need to understand is that, also, more is less. When we add details or words or descriptions to our point or to even a sentence, we are doing a disservice to ourselves because here’s what happens. When you or I, he, she or someone, that has a lot of adjectives, a lot of points, all those points compete with each other for your attention. And then that competition, they’re diluting the impact of each other.

And we can just say an example. Let’s say I was the CEO of our company, and I said, “This new approach is going to make us more successful and experienced and powerful, effective, efficient, memorable, and brilliant.” Now, not many people are going to remember all of those words and, even if they could, they wouldn’t know which one was more important.

If an executive says, “This approach will make us more effective. Let me show you how,” because there’s only one idea, it really sinks into our brains. Now, I’m not saying that every presentation can only have one idea, although it’d be a beautiful thing, but if you have multiple ideas, you want to separate them and delineate them, “First thing, I’m going to talk about this idea. Then we’re going to move on and talk about this idea. And, finally, we’re going to look at how this affects the world around us.” So, I’ve delineated these instead of attaching them all together.

Remember, all we need to do, as speakers and communicators, is say the words that we’re familiar with. What does an audience need to do? A lot. They need to hear it. They need to process it. “Is this relevant? Should I write this down? Should I tweak this? Do I need to remember this? Should I share this with my direct reports?” So much needs to happen in their brains, as we say something, that by the time they processed it, we’re another six points down the road. So, we need to make it simple. We need to understand that more is less. We need to speak more slowly. We need to introduce pauses so that people have that critical digestion time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, those are some things that are common mistakes. And what do you see as some of the best-in-class examples or things to do to really do a fine job of engaging and inspiring?

Joel Schwartzberg
Our job, the most important part of a communication is the point because that’s where you’re doing the hard sell for your product or your service that creates this solution that you’ve matched in advance to whoever you’re speaking to, whether it’s potential clients or partners or customers. So, there are ways to reinforce that point in the middle of your presentation. And this is what I counsel leaders to do, and these I call attention magnets.

So, attention magnets include, “I recommend,” “I propose,” “Here’s the thing,” “Look, if there’s one thing you need to know, it’s this,” or, “My point is this.” And one of my public speaking idols is Michelle Obama. Now, when she spoke at the Virtual 2020 Democratic National Convention, she said these three things, and they seemed repetitive if I just pull them out and say them to you now, but these are direct quotes.

One, she said, “And let me, once again, tell you this.” Later, she said, “Let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can.” And then before she finished, she said, “If you take one thing from my words tonight, it is this.” Now, these are attention magnets and anyone can do them, not just Michelle Obama, so I encourage people to use those.

What they are are shortcuts to your point. But in front of any audience, if I said, “Oh, we talked about a lot today, but here’s the thing,” you could tell by just that example that that sort of drills attention to the point, you’ve captured it for a moment, and you want to fill that spot with your point, not with some detritus, some detail, something irrelevant. And to do that, you need to know your point.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, as you say those words, I could just sort of imagine an audience of people looking at phones and then looking up, and sort of like, “Oh, I feel kind of guilty that I’ve been semi-ignoring you.”

Joel Schwartzberg
Right. That’s why I call them attention magnets, not even getters, but magnets.

Pete Mockaitis
Very nice. Okay. And I’m also curious if there are any particular words and phrases that you really love or really hate in terms of being extra effective. So, we’ve had some attention magnet phrases, which are great. Any other key bits that should be on the do’s or don’ts list for our own vocabularies?

Joel Schwartzberg
Right. Well, the first thing I would say is authenticity is critical. Even if you have speechwriters working for you, as many leaders do, you should never say anything, nothing should come out of your mouth that is something you wouldn’t ordinarily say because audiences can pick up on that. It’s artificial. So, always scrutinize whatever you’re saying or reading to make sure it matches who you are and how you normally talk.

In terms of specific words, and, Pete, I really like to give nuts and bolts sort of tactics, not just broad encouragements, so there are things where leaders know that people are saying one word and it actually falls just short of what they intend. I’m talking about when people say allow when they really mean enable. What does it mean when we say allow? Well, we sort of stood aside and we let something happen. We didn’t play a part in it, an active part in it, but maybe we did. Maybe we made it happen. Maybe through our lobbying, that law came about. So, then we enabled it, but we often say we allowed this to happen.

Another is avoid versus prevent. If you actively prevented something, don’t go smaller and say, “We just avoided it.” Another is when we address things, “We addressed this problem.” What does that mean? We looked at it, we read it, we talked about it. But did we act on it? So, if you did act on it, if you overcame a problem, that’s act versus address. And there are a few of these, I call them strategic word swaps. This is another article I wrote for Harvard Business Review, where you can scrutinize a speech, especially ahead of time, or as you’re practicing, to talk about things, like, “We want to overcome goals versus face them,” “We want to accomplish a goal versus meet it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, those are handy word swaps. And then that’s interesting in that those words are all okay, and you took them to great. I’m curious if there are any words that are just kind of terrible For example, one word I frequently coach people to not say in a presentation is “obviously” because it kind of suggests, like, “Hey, if you didn’t know this, you’re an idiot,” and it can sort of be off putting and feel maybe patronizing or arrogant to say obviously, even though sometimes people use it innocently as a vocal pause, or even if they’re a little bit bashful, like, “I’m about to say something that you probably already know, and I don’t want you to think that I think this is a super insightful thing so I’m going to soften it by saying obviously.” I recommend just not doing that.

So, I’m curious, are there any other words, like obviously, that you recommend kind of striking out?

Joel Schwartzberg
Yeah, one of the words I really don’t like is “additionally” or “clearly,” not even because of the impression that people make out of them, which may be haughty, but they’re generally unnecessary. Remember when I said that more is less, and less is more? We often don’t need words like “additionally” or “clearly,” or “it need not be said that.” Often, “that is” a two-word phrase that can be removed. Remember, people are listening to it for the first time so we want to make that language as simple as possible.

I find a lot of people using synonyms all the time, “We want to make this television advertisement more powerful and resonant,” or “reach more people and to be truly resonant.” Well, those are virtual synonyms, but your audience, they’re deciding between two things. So, really scrutinize, when you give multiple things, for those synonyms so you can get closer and closer to the one thing.

And you probably know, Pete, and many of your audience know, in advertising, they often try to take out as many adjectives as they can, and adverbs, because, let’s remember that, adjectives only give the briefest kind of description to something, and it’s always going to be a generic one. What does it mean that something is great, awesome, interesting? I call these badjectives because they’re easy enough, we love them, “This product is great,” but to an audience, what does it mean? Lots of things are great. “I had a great tuna fish this afternoon.”

So, to solve that problem, ask yourself, “Well, why is it great?” “Well, this product is great because it allows us to make sure food doesn’t go bad in the refrigerator?” Aha, so now you have this product as great because it keeps things fresh in the refrigerator. Now, you don’t even need the great word, the badjective, why not just say that this product keeps your food fresh in the refrigerator. So, what we’ve done is we’ve spotted the badjective, we’ve asked why to get to the real outcome, and then we’ve removed the badjective. It’s almost mathematical in the approach.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that. That reminds me of resumes in terms of if you have a lot of adjectives about yourself, it’s sort of like, “Well, okay, says who? And I guess you think you’re great but that’s…” versus if you have actual sort of results, accomplishments, responsibilities, then they’re just facts, and facts don’t tend to need a lot of adjectives. And I guess if you do use an adjective, kind of like I’m thinking about sort of like movies that have…or blurbs, again like the books. When movies say, “Hey, we’re great,” they like to grab it from such and such reviewer from the New York Times that said, “A masterpiece!”

Joel Schwartzberg
“Go see it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Then that packs a little bit more weight, so maybe on the resume it might be like, “Received stellar remarks on reviews including…” whatever. That can make more sense

Joel Schwartzberg
And I’ll tell you something really interesting or sort of ironic that struck me when I was looking at a particular word. The word is hope, and leaders use the word hope a lot, and they should. It’s their job to have vision and point to a future. But here’s the funny thing. Hope works best in leadership as a noun and not as a verb. If we say, “I hope this will happen,” “I hope that this product will succeed,” you’re sort of taking yourself out of the role of making sure it succeeds. You’re sort of gambling on the future when you use hope as a verb.

But when you use it as a noun, you’re creating a vision and a future and a goal for your audience, “Our hope is that we will reach this level of success,” “We have hope that this product will sell,” or, “…that will reach this audience,” or that, “We have hope now that we’ll save the planet,” as opposed to, “I hope we can save the planet.” There’s a subtle difference even though it’s the same word. So, as we scrutinize these words, the language of leadership, as I like to say, there are often many ways to look at it but only one way to use it successfully to, like I say, engage and inspire.

Pete Mockaitis
And we’ve sort of been talking, and this is I’ve been visualizing or even talking about sort of like an in-person face-to-face context. Do you have any thoughts for when it comes to email, Slack, text messaging, how to think about communication that engages and inspires there?

Joel Schwartzberg
Absolutely, but each one of those is sort of different. I like to focus on email and I like to focus on Zoom or video meetings. In terms of email, a lot of it boils down to the subject line, “Am I making myself clear? And in making myself clear, am I engaging the people I’m trying to reach? In the body of an email, am I writing a novella or am I making it easier for my audience, my reader, to engage with me and understand the points I’m trying to make? Am I using bullets? Am I bolding things or using colors?”

One thing I say about email is it’s a hard and fast rule and it shocks people at first, and that is no No paragraph more than three sentences. I often use paragraphs of one sentence. What it does, it allows you to break up your ideas for your own conveyance but it also really helps the audience understand the breakdown of the points you’re trying to make, and that builds engagement.

There are also a lot of things we already discussed about hope and vision and authenticity that sort of create that inspiration. Now, on Zoom, there are a lot of other practices that really help what I like to say elevate your presence on Zoom, and much of it is visual. I see a lot of Zoom calls where leaders are way back, or their head is cut off, or they have a messy room behind them that distracts. So, when I train my clients and my leaders is to show your head and your shoulders, to understand that eye contact means looking into the camera not into the Brady Bunch grid as I like to call it, and to really check your environment, because anything in your environment that doesn’t support your point steals from your point.

And so, these are ways we can not only elevate our leadership but avoid some of the things that may hurt and injure and sabotage our leadership because they’re working against us.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Joel, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Joel Schwartzberg
Know that the one thing I’d like people to take away, and I’m going to use one of those attention magnets, is that it all boils down to having a point. If you don’t have a point, you are literally pointless and you should be nervous, and you should be expecting yourself to ramble because you need to know the one idea you need to get across to make that point, to champion it, so that you can really have an impact on your audience.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Joel Schwartzberg
I’m not sure who said it. It could’ve been a high school chum, but something that I keep coming back to is “It’s not about you being best, it’s about being the best you.” And, to me, what it means is we are all super qualified, uniquely qualified, in each communication setting to make that point. Even Michelle Obama or a famous CEO cannot do the job we do if we’ve prepared and practiced and have experienced to make a point to an audience.

And that quote about being the best you, connects a lot to a mistake people make when they give speeches, when I say, “What is your goal in this speech?” They’ll say, “My goal is not to screw up. My goal is not to embarrass myself.” Well, that really isn’t your goal. Your goal is really to move a point from A to B, not to be thought of as brilliant, or as the next Michelle Obama, or the next head of industry unless you want more public speaking gigs.

You’re more like a bicycle delivery person moving a package, which is your point from here to there. And guess what, you’re the one person in the world most qualified to do it. And that’s what it means to be the best you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Joel Schwartzberg
My favorite research is probably the research that was done on mindsets, and the difference between having a closed mindset and an open mindset. And the closed mindset means you’re not open to learning, and an open mindset means that you’re open to experiencing new things and learn from them. And I forget the name of the study. I think it’s fixed mindset and I forget the name of the other.

Pete Mockaitis
Growth mindset.

Joel Schwartzberg
Growth mindset. You’re exactly right. That sort of blew my world because it goes back to your childhood, the way you were raised. Sometimes kids are very, very smart but what they learn is, “I’m going to stay in my lane because I’m good at this and I’ll never be good at that, so I’m never going to try something new.” And often, those kids, overall, will not do as well as the kids who were not told they were geniuses but told to learn as much as they can.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Joel Schwartzberg
My favorite book is Les Miserables probably because I read it in high school. I’m more of an article reader than I am a book reader because of my time. So, the places I like to go to get sort of my research is Harvard Business Review. It’s a place where I see a lot of data-driven stories, sometimes I go to Fast Company. But there’s a lot out there.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Joel Schwartzberg
Probably my to-do list. I can’t rely on my memory, and most people cannot either, so I’m constantly making to-do lists. And by that, I mean a physical to-do list, the yellow sticky notes, but every computer also has a digital to-do list. And the nice thing about that to-do list is it doesn’t go away until you close it. So, even if you put multiple screens, that to-do list, that digital sticky note will always be there. So, I rely on actual sticky notes as well as the digital sticky notes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Joel Schwartzberg
I really like editing. I’m not sure if you can call that a habit. I’m really a grammarian at heart, and nothing sort of interest me more than using Grammarly, which is another tool I really enjoy, to look at a document and to discover the ways it can be improved by making it tighter, by making it more focused, and by making it more grammatically correct. I know that’s not a habit like cooking or fishing, but I live, eat, and drink, as my wife likes to say, the world of expression and the world of making points. So, everything I find myself doing and interesting are in that universe or in that sort of frequency of thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Joel Schwartzberg
The idea of less is more, and simpler is better. One thing that CEOs I worked with go back to me is this idea of get in, get out. When you need to make a point, it’s easy for leaders to start to elaborate on it, talk about case studies, talk about things they’d read, talk about meetings they have had, because that’s where their mind goes. So, I often have to remind them, “Get in, get out. Make your point and get out so the audience has time to receive that and process it.”

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Joel Schwartzberg
I would point them to www.JoelSchwartzberg.net. A lot of what I talk about is I like to call it open code. I like to share it. I don’t like to keep it to myself. So, that’s one place where I put all the articles I’ve written, the books I’ve written. I share ideas there, podcasts I’ve been on. So, if you want to get a deeper dive into all of these ideas about how to engage and inspire, how to make and champion a point, there are a lot of resources there that I prove, because I wrote most of them, that people can utilize right away.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Joel Schwartzberg
I would tell people to think about what they’re going to say before they say it. The worst thing, the biggest mistake you can make is to wing it because you think you know it backwards and forwards, because you’ve studied it, you researched it, it’s your job. A lot of lawyers, nothing against lawyers, but a lot of lawyers I worked with often think they’re so knowledgeable about these areas that they are automatically good communicators, and that is not the case.

Communication is using another part of your brain. So, my one takeaway is really, before your next meeting, or your next communication, take a moment to think, “What is my point? Did I make it clearly? Will it have impact? And if there’s one thing I want my recipient to do, to think, or to take action on as a result of what I say, what is it? And what can I do to make that possible?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you, Joel. This has been a pleasure and I wish you many fun encounters of engagement and inspiration.

Joel Schwartzberg
Thank you, Pete. This has been fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Ethan, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Ethan Becker
All right. I’m psyched to be here. I’ve been waiting. This is great.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I’m psyched too. And so, I want to hear, so you’ve spent a long time working with folks, helping them communicate all the better. Is there a particularly surprising or fascinating discovery you’ve made along the way?

Ethan Becker
I think what surprised me is the similarities that people have around the world. We travel all over the world. Well, this year, nobody’s traveling, but like normally we’re on airplanes.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, working buddy.

Ethan Becker
And the various cultures around the planet, mostly what we see on television, on the media, and on the internet highlights differences, and it’s designed for division because that’s like divide people because it sells ads. But in the work that we do as speech coaches, we see the similarities almost identical in some cases, culture after culture after culture. That surprises me, which I think is profound actually.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. And so, what are a few universals that cut across everything?

Ethan Becker
Well, for instance, people get nervous when they have to speak in front of a group, not everybody does. Not everybody does. But the psychology around it and the reasons behind it are often similar. People get uncomfortable in the business world, when they need to give feedback, for instance. And, again, not everybody. I’m generalizing. But the kinds of things that we hear and see are almost identical.

Like, I’ll hear somebody tell me that, “My manager just doesn’t understand me. He’s putting too much stuff on my plate.” Like, I might hear something like that here in Massachusetts or when I’m in Malaysia, it’s like the same things. Once you get through the culture, the obvious cultural uniqueness of a different environment, there are very, very common similarities in all cultures.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, good to know for the world travelers or future returning travelers amongst us. Well, let’s chat a bit about your book Mastering Communication at Work. So, it’s been a while since the previous edition was published. Tell us, you say that everything and nothing has changed in the interim. What do you mean by that?

Ethan Becker
Yeah, there’s not a whole lot that’s changed. Much of what we know in human communication and psychology comes from Aristotle over centuries ago but there have been some things we’ve seen get updated. We updated the book. We did a second edition. We added a section for gender equity and a section for virtual communication, not because of COVID but just, in general, the technology curve has increased so there were some changes there. But a lot of how we think and process and connect and how we get good and develop skill in communication hasn’t changed too much. So, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so let’s talk a little bit about how that’s done but, first, maybe a little bit of the why. Just what kind of an impact does having excellent communication skills make for a professional?

Ethan Becker
The answer varies, really. In most cases, the impact is going to be pretty significant because when you can get your ideas and thoughts out in a way where another human can hear it, decode it, and understand it, usually things tend to go well. And when that doesn’t happen, it can be highly frustrating. So, in most cases, it’s a pretty positive experience.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And can you share maybe a story of someone who saw a transformation and what impact that made for them?

Ethan Becker
Sure. One client of ours who enjoys sharing his story with us, Jon Platt. He’s the chairman at Sony Music. So, when Jon first came to us, he was executive vice president, and this is the fellow who was a producer for like Jay Z and Beyonce and so forth, but he was looking to move up in his career. And one of the things he was saying, “So, look, I need to strengthen my ability to articulate my ideas in these senior executive levels,” which is a different kind of communication than he was able to do with artists.

Jon has a real talent, a real ear for talent, and he was able to negotiate very effective deals with artists, and he needed to update the language he was using and the approach he was using to communicate internally with those who would be in a position to put him in a position of leadership, and he did. He did. He did the work. It was very difficult at times because he had to learn to behave in ways that were new for him.

But, as he did that, he moved up the ladder pretty quickly throughout. He was at EMI at the time, and then he moved over to Sony, and he’s doing very well these days. But a great example of someone who put the time and effort into strengthening the quality of his communication skills and now he’s benefitting from that.

We see these examples all the time. Not everything is high profile. We’ll see this, sometimes, it could just be a typical manager or somebody maybe they have no interest in being a manager. Not everyone wants to move up in organization, that’s just one example. Sometimes it’s just a matter of somebody feeling comfortable on their own team, or learning how to communicate with peers comfortably, or it might be a presentation, anything like that. We see these kinds of things happen all the time with folks.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m curious to hear about that notion about certain behaviors needed to change when you’re communicating in a more senior level. What are some of the key difference-makers when we are communicating like a leader? How does that differ from just kind of typical, normal everyday patterns in behaviors you may have around communication?

Ethan Becker
One way of looking at this, I’ve heard some other discussion around some Aristotle, and this would be a good idea to maybe sort of clarify some ideas around it. Aristotle, one of the reasons that speech coaches look at Aristotle is because he was one of the early philosophers to look at how we think, how we process information. And so, some of the terms we hear tossed around a little bit are a little bit sometimes not always clear. But he was saying people tend to think and process in one of two different ways, either inductive or deductive. These are the terms that are used.

And here’s what it means. If I’m an inductive thinker, it’s just who I am. What that means is that I need to have specific pieces of information that lead to me a general conclusion, it’s called going from the specific details to the general conclusion, what you want happens at the end. That’s inductive.

For instance, if I were to say to you, “Hey, listen, last weekend, I was at a family barbecue, and my mother-in-law was there. And she said, ‘Ethan, I think you should lose a little weight.’ Well, I think that was kind of rude of her but she’s the mother-in-law so she can say anything she wants to say. So, I thought I would take up jogging and I went to the mall to get a new pair of sneakers. And it was really frustrating that day because it was Sunday and it was really crowded.”

“There was a lot of sales on Sundays, by the way. So, I got into the parking lot and I couldn’t find a place to park, and this other guy came and cut me off. And I was going to get out and confront him but I was really just here for the sneakers so I had to park in the remote parking lot which was really frustrating because I had to walk to the front of the mall and I had this old pair of shoes. And if it gets too sore, the shoes get a little sore in the back of my foot, and thenI have to see my doctor, which is a nightmare because the lady at the desk hates me. She hates everybody.”

“You’re with me still? Good. You see, because I went into the shoe store and they didn’t have sneakers. I thought that was interesting so I asked if I could talk to the manager, and they sent me down to the sports shop. And at the sports shop, they didn’t have white sneakers. And I like the white ones because if they get dirty, you can bleach them. They’re just like new. So, that leads me to what I’m going to ask you today because, see, now I’m going to go jogging this afternoon, and I don’t want to get my new pair of sneakers dirty. So, could you tell me is it going to rain?”

“Is it going to rain? That was my point. That is what I needed to know.” But, you see, if I think and process in an inductive way, I can’t just ask that, “I think you need to know about the mother-in-law, and the parking lot, and the doctor, and all that.” And if you’re hearing my example right now, and you’re thinking, “Oh, the guy is just rambling about random stuff,” “Hold on a second. It’s not random inside of my mind. Somehow these things are all connected to each other.”

Now, this is an inductive pattern. Now, you don’t have to be that inductive. That’s an extreme example. I could be slightly inductive and it’s less frustrating. I could say, “Hey, listen, Pete, I just got a new pair of sneakers and I don’t want to get them dirty as I go jogging. Do you know if it’s going to rain?” So, I’m giving you the background information first and then the point, then what I want. That is known as an inductive pattern.

The deductive pattern is different. It is the exact opposite. You start with the point and then you give your details. So, for instance, somebody who is extremely deductive, they might sound like this, “Rain?” That’s it. Now, I don’t have to be that deductive. I could say, “Do you know if it’s going to rain? I just got a new pair of sneakers and I don’t want to get them dirty as I go jogging.” “Hey, I just got a new pair of sneakers and I don’t want to get them dirty as I go jogging. Do you know if it’s going to…?”

Can you hear the difference between the two patterns?

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And when you said, it’s interesting that you say some people just are inductive. So, when in your first rambling example, I guess I found that very frustrating and thought, “Oh, I hate this.” Like, as I imagine that person talking to me, like, this is like, “Oh, I hate this. When are they going to shut up?” And I say, “Pete, be compassionate. And I’ll be patient with them. That’s kind of what was going on in my mind. But if someone is inductive, and they’re hearing that, might they be like, “Oh, this is really interesting and engaging”? That seems hard for me to believe.

Ethan Becker
Yeah, spoken like a true deductive listener. See, one of the reasons these matters is because one of these two people meet each other, look out, there’s a level of frustration that just breaks the communication down. If I’m a deductive thinker, it’s just who I am. I process in a deductive way. And this inductive person comes to talk to me? What I look like is frustrated, you know, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh,” I’m like nodding my head, “Uh-huh,” waving my hand, “Mm-hmm, yup. What do you want? Get to the point.” I get so frustrated to the point that I’m not even listening anymore. I might be looking at you and I might not be talking but the comprehension is very low. I would need you to do it in a deductive way for me.

And the reverse is true, by the way, also. If I’m an inductive thinker, and this deductive person comes to talk to me, what I would look like is very frustrated, “What? Whoa, wait a minute. Hold on. Slow down. How did you get to the…? Back up just a minute here.” So, this isn’t about right or wrong. The language we like to use here, this is about what’s effective versus ineffective. Therefore, the skill is to, number one, know which way you tend to lean. And, number two, probably more importantly, is, what does your listener, or listeners, need you to be? What do they need you to be in order to make it as easy as possible for them to receive the information, comprehend the information, and see what you’re trying to communicate? That’s the skill around here.

And where sometimes there’s a confusion is there are folks who will say, “You should always be deductive. Tell them the point up front.” It’s, like, well, that’s not bad advice for deductive thinkers. “Well, senior executives are always deductive.” Oh, that is not true. That is not true. I coach CEOs all over the world, and I know many who are inductive in the way they think. However, we know it is a trend that the more senior we become, there is a trend to become more deductive, so it’s not a bad way to plan but you always want to be ready to pivot.

Just like in the game of soccer, if I were to say to you, “Only kick the ball with your right foot. Never kick with your left,” that’s really poor advice. It doesn’t help you. The skill is to learn both. And that’s easy to understand, hard to do, because one of these is our comfort zone, and the other one is, Pete, you did a great job of explaining a second ago, kind of annoying. It’s like, “Will you just shut up and get to the point?”

In Jon’s case, what he did really, really well is he was very deductive in the way he thought because he knows a lot about the music business. And as he grew, and people would come to him with deals, he was listening deductively but they were talking inductively. He trained himself how to listen in an inductive way. And when he did, he says two things happened.

Number one is the quality of the relationships with those around him strengthened. And, number two, he actually learned stuff. It was like, “I could learn things.” So, it’s a good skill to look at. I know it’s old but the reason we’ve never decided to give cute names to it, or get into the psychometric, a lot of the psychometric tests have come from some of the Aristotle stuff, is that we just found that in the business world, when you teach it in its raw form, it’s much easier for people to hear it, comprehend it, and, most importantly, apply it in their daily life without us there coaching and so.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s an interesting point with the deductive-listening approach. Like, on the one hand, we stay focused on the point, what really matters. But, on the other hand, when it comes to deal-making, you could very well be missing opportunities in terms of like, “Oh, that thing that you were just kind of rambling on about actually contained some kernels of stuff that’s useful clues about what really matters to you, or what really frustrates you, or if I could get incorporated in this deal for you, you’d be willing to make a concession elsewhere that is of more benefit to me. And if I were just like laser-focused about what just sort what just washed passed me, I’d miss out on it.”

Ethan Becker
Yeah. In the world of selling, we do a lot of this kind of work with sales professionals. And if you look at traditional selling, it’s been around for a while, the inductive approach is pretty much what’s trained, like, “Don’t tell them the price until you have presented the value proposition,” and it is drilled into people.

Pete Mockaitis
And I guess I haven’t thought about it in these terms but I guess I am super deductive because when I’m talking to a sales person, I guess, I want them to prove that they’ve got the goods. And so, they’re like, “Let me tell you a little bit about the history of our company. So, we were founded in 1974 by a couple who had some frustration with their…” and I was like, “I don’t care at all.” Like, “Show me some compelling data, tests, experiments, case studies, that reveal that you’re the real deal and you can do what you claim to be able to do supremely well such that I can trust that you can do it for me.”

And then I do get frustrated when they don’t do that. And sometimes I even tell them, it’s like, “Hey, heads up, here’s what I find very persuasive.” It’s like I’m giving you a roadmap to selling me, and sometimes it just doesn’t matter at all, they do their scripts.

Ethan Becker
Well, funny you bring that up, if you look at different sales methodologies that are out there, whether it’s Sandler or SPIN, or many of them are challengers, some of these things have been around for a very long time, these sort of older models that were, for the most part, what are they trying to do? They’re trying to teach the salesperson to learn something about the listener, understand their situation, and the problems, and the implications, and then go back and present what they need.

And those who are really skilled at it have very high-quality listening ability, and they’re listening for a lot of different things. Those who are brand-new are reading a script of questions, and people hate them, they want to smack them. But what are they listening for? Does this person need a more inductive or deductive approach? And when that’s not taught, when it is said, “Don’t tell them the price, tell the value,” that’s nice if, in some cases, that may be the case. But, in other cases, oh, my goodness.

It’s not just selling a product, like, let’s say, you’re trying to sell your idea to senior management, and you’re asking for, I don’t know, half a million dollars for your project, and you inductively lead up to that. And if that particular team are deductive, if it’s a deductive group of listeners, here’s what they hear. As you go through your value and the data and all of the details, what they hear is this, “[muffled sounds] half a million dollars.” Like, they missed it. Why? Because in their mind, all they’re thinking is, “What do you want? Where are you going with this?”

Now, that doesn’t mean start out by showing up and saying, “Hey, I need half a million dollars.” Some teams you might, but it means know your listener. The real thing is you can’t get too far on one way or the other.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And I’m thinking right now in terms of like best practices and how to kind of, as best as you can, be all things to all people in terms of, hey, we have an executive summary on the handout, and then we go into some of the details, or whatever, or just a little bit of a preview, “I’ve got an exciting investment opportunity I think it can give us 8X ROI that will cost about half a million dollars, and here are some of the details.”

Ethan Becker
Yeah, “What do you want?” and, “What do you want?” And so, from you, I’m going to ask you for approval. I’m going to ask, “What do you want from them?” Sometimes it’s nothing, “I’m just giving you an update.” The main point that you need might be at the beginning, and when we do that, for instance, like what you’re talking about in an executive summary, or when we look at, for instance, structure, there’s a structure that we introduced to the world back in 1964. It was actually ’63. The firm started in 1964, but in 1963, my mom and dad, both were on ABC television and they were interviewed about communication. It was sort of the year they were just starting the company.

And they were asked about this, and they talked about this, what we today we’ve referred to, and in my book, I talk about this, is we refer to it as the four-step outline.

Step number one has three words, “Tell what tell,” is the way we put it. And this is when you tell your listeners what you’re going to be talking about, how long you’ll be talking for, and how many particular topics. This might be your deductive point if it’s a deductive presentation. You might say what you want from them here. If it’s an inductive presentation, you might not. You might save that till later. But “Tell what tell” is when you set the expectation of what’s going to happen.

Step number two, this one kind of get dropped in some places but we still teach it, three words, “Tell why listen.” And this is a brief statement as to why they should listen to this presentation. It’s not necessarily why they should agree with you, or buy what you’re selling, or the why of the idea, or any of that jazz. It’s, “So, you’re going to talk about your department’s update. So, what? Why? Is this a good time for me to check my email? Like, why should I pay attention right now?” And we can talk about that in a bit, but that’s basically what it is; it’s brief commentary, and sometimes you have more than one if you have a group of people. If you got multiple people in the room, you might have to have more than one reason why they’re listening to this.

Step three, “Tell,” that’s the body of your presentation where most of your time is spent. Step four, “Tell what told,” and it’s a summarization, summaries of two parts to them. The first part is you repeat your most important points, not everything, but you go back and what it is those points are. And in some meetings, some business meetings, those points may have evolved over the course of the meeting, but you repeat, you come back, meaning if they’ve turned into discussion. But what are your most important points?

And then the second part is an action statement. What do you want your listeners to do? Now that they know this, do they go somewhere, call somebody? Maybe it’s just a soft action, like to consider or think about, things like that. But that’s it, tell them what you can tell them, tell them what they should listen, tell them what you told them.

And in some talks, we’ll reverse steps one and two, or repeat it, or if it’s a conference talk, or like a TED Talk, we might start out with a story, which is one big fat step number two that leads up to what we’re going to do. But when we look with inductive and deductive, well, that outline could apply either way. It depends who your listeners are.

Pete Mockaitis
And for the telling them why they should listen, you said that’s distinct from why they should buy or do the thing. So, could you give us some examples of statements or articulations of why to listen?

Ethan Becker
Sure. And sometimes they overlap so that’s fine. And when I’m coaching clients, sometimes the reason to buy is also a reason to listen. I just don’t think it’s that as strong.

So, let’s take the example of I’m a product manager and I’m presenting at a national sales meeting to the salesforce. And my job was to go up and do a 20-minute presentation on the new product, and my boss needs me to get the sales team all jazzed up about this because they’re going to be selling it for the next year.

All right, I’ll make this a little harder on me. It’s not even a new product. It’s the same product. We hear this all the time, it’s like, “There’s not even anything new but I still have to get them all excited about it.” So, step one and step two, “All right. Well, thanks, everybody. Over the next 20 minutes, I’m going to be talking to you about the product and all of the changes,” there’s step one.

“This is important because, for those of you who are not familiar with what’s different, this is going to help you feel very confident out in the field, that you know what is and what isn’t different about this so that you don’t accidentally say the wrong thing.” In that example, it’s not profound. This is where we get tripped up. Sometimes people feel like step number two needs to be this profound sale, “This will save your life.” It’s like, well, sure, that is a reason to listen but, in most business meetings, it’s usually something, “Who are your listeners? And why do they care about the particular topic?”

Let say, in that exact same example I just gave, there’s another targeted group, maybe they’re in that same group at the sales meeting, I also have people from finance at the meeting and I want to target them as well. So, it might sound something like this, “So, over the next 20 minutes, I’ll be taking you through the new product and so you can see all of the changes. And for those in sales, this is going to help you understand exactly what is and what isn’t different so that when you’re out in front of your customers, you have all the knowledge you need and you’re not going to look bad in front of them.” You’re not going to look bad in front of them, that’s the reason.

“For those of you in finance, I’m glad you’re here today. While this isn’t specific for you, this is going to give you some very good insight as to why we have been asking for what we have been, and where the money that you’ve been allocating to the team has gone. Okay,” and then they get into it, blah, blah, blah.

Now, I’m making up examples here. When we have real topics, it’s actually you can think about, “Who are these people? Who are my listeners? And why do they care?” And sometimes it’s hard because we’re so close to this, we just assume they know why. If you’re presenting to senior management just an update on your department, “Why?” “Well, because they told me to come,” but you can’t say that. I mean, you could say that but that’s not going to be very helpful. So, you might say, “So, this is going to give you the most up-to-date information on my team,” or something like that.

Sometimes folks will say, “But, Ethan, that sounds obvious.” Yeah. Well, we found in our research on this is that even when the listener knows why the speaker is talking, that when the speaker says it out loud, it just confirms in the back of their mind, “Why I’m here, why I am listening,” even if it’s not about them. They now understand who the speaker is talking to. It’s all part of setting the expectations.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, certainly. And it may seem obvious but that’s one of my top pet peeves when talking about communication because when people use the vocal pause “Obviously,” when it’s not obvious, and me as the recipient, it’s like, “Oh, actually, I didn’t know that but, apparently, it was obvious so I must be an idiot.” So, I just think that’s a great word to purge from one’s vocabulary.

Ethan Becker
I love it. I love it.

Pete Mockaitis
So, one, it may not be so obvious. You may have a different set of assumptions coming in, and you clarify that right up front, which is great, and then folks might reorient and say, “Oh, wait a second. I thought this was about this.” And if they’ve got the right kind of culture, “Hey, actually, I guess I don’t need to be here. Thank you for letting me know up front. I’m going to spend my time on this other thing because I had a different impression.”

Or, they can know that, “Hey, given that we’re moving in a slightly different direction than I had imagined, I’m going to formulate some different questions.” It’s just helpful. And I like the way you said it in terms of, “This is important for you because…” and then the way you arrived there is just by really putting yourself in their shoes in terms of, “I’m a salesperson, why do I care about this? Oh, because if I don’t have the info, I’m going to sound dumb. I may commit to something we can’t deliver, then we’re really going to be in a bigger pickle because we’ve disappointed somebody or we’ve blown a sale that could’ve been saved had we just sort of gotten it right the first time.”

Ethan Becker
Yeah, in that example, in the “Hey, we got to present to the sales team…“ example, this is an important one because sometimes marketing, product marketing, there’s sort of this fear of saying something that could possibly be perceived as negative. And when you look at inductive and deductive, we were sort of joking a little bit that all salespeople are trained to be inductive, right? Yes, as talkers. However, when it is time to listen, what we found in the work that we do is they tend to be deductive when they’re listening.

So, if you’re at a conference, and you’re trying to do a “Tell why listen,” step two, “Tell why listen,” first is you got to say at the beginning of your talk, can’t save it till the end. In general, we have found folks who are in the profession of selling, they tend to care about two things, and if you can tap into one of those, you have their undivided attention. Any guesses on what they are, two things salespeople care about? Listeners right now could think about it, say it out loud in your car.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ll say commissions and delighting their customers.

Ethan Becker
Very, very close. Commissions, yes, it falls into the category of money. Money, how much? And I don’t mean that in a mean-spirited way. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. Look, folks who are in the profession of selling are typically hired with a particular…that’s a desirable thing. There’s nothing wrong with that, “How much will I make?”

So, if I’m at the conference, I’m at the company conference, and you’re talking to me about the same product, or a new product, or a plan, or a program, in my mind, I’m thinking, “How much will I make?” is one, or, “How will this help me get to my number or my goal?” something related to that. Fine. The second one is, “Is what you’re talking about going to make it easier or harder for me to make that number? Are you going to make my world easier or harder?”

There’s a big focus on that because they know the amount of work that they already need to do. And now they’re at the conference, “And if your product is going to make my life easy, you have my eye. I’m excited. If it’s going to be hard, I might not be excited but don’t BS me. Don’t try to tell me that this is wonderful when I can see it’s the exact same product with a different brochure color. Just be up front. I’ll respect you more.”

Because if I’m that rep, I’m out there in the field by myself representing, I need to know what I have to work with, so deductively say that near the beginning. You don’t have to say it in a gloom-and-doom way but just be straight up, “I’ll know how to take it out there. I might be upset about it but that’s a different story.” So, if you can be deductive about it, and you can connect to one of those two things in your step two, you’re going to do really, really well in that kind of a meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Thank you.

Ethan Becker
Quite frankly, others, too. If you’re presenting to senior management, you got bad news, you don’t have to pretend it’s not there. They’ll respect you. You don’t have to say, “I have bad news.” No, not like that. But you don’t have to be nervous about it. These are business meetings, and if there’s something that’s not great, you can say it.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. Okay, I like it.

Ethan Becker
I’m going on and on on this stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you’ve also got a concept called The Four Horsemen of Delivery. So, I’m curious, what are those horsemen and how do we master that?

Ethan Becker
All right. Deductively, they are speed, volume, stress, and inflection. Now these are delivery-specific things. And delivery, is not an effective presentation all by itself. Some folks could argue that it could be.

Pete Mockaitis
I think I’ve seen some keynoters who’ve managed to make a living out of good delivery without a lot of substance.

Ethan Becker
We see it a lot. This is not theater. That’s something I want to be very, very clear about. In fact, you’ll never hear somebody like me use words like rehearse, for instance. It’s a theater term. And in the business world, we ain’t acting.

And when we try to teach it in that way, folks tend to do well in training, but then they get there live and the anxiety can be very high. I think a more helpful way to look at it isn’t so much rehearse and so forth, but practice is a much more accurate term because speech is a behavior just like kicking a ball is a behavior, so we practice. You don’t go to basketball rehearsal. You go to basketball practice so that you can learn how to do things.

And in our delivery, we look at things like speed, and volume, and stressing of words, and inflection changing the word, things like that. These are tools that can help us enhance the intent of any sentence. Together, all of these things, we call it adding color to a word. And this is a technique, many of us do this normally, in our normal natural communication when we’re talking with friends. And the variety in our speech patterns are just there, for many of us.

But when we get into a formal presentation, all of a sudden, the speech pattern is almost identical, things change. So, the Four Horsemen of speed, and volume, and stress, and inflection are four things that you can look at specifically.

Speed is broken into two parts. We have what’s called the rate of speech and the pace of speech. I’ll say it again because you can think about it, for you listeners, your own speaking. Rate is the speed at which we put words together. We speak, on average, at approximately 183 words per minute, is the average rate of speech. If you were to go to a meeting today and start counting words, you’ll get to it, in general American, which is what we speak in the United States. We don’t speak English, we speak American. But, in general American, we speak at approximately 183, a little more, a little less depending on who you are.

If I start talking at a faster rate right now, right now my rate of speech has just increased. I’m probably, I don’t know, maybe more like 213 words per minute right now. That’s rate. Pace is the speed at which we put thoughts together. So, I can actually be a faster talking like this, and as long as I pause every so often, you’ll actually be able to follow and process the things that I’m talking about. But if I start talking at a faster rate like this and I don’t pause for pacing, and I start talking about technical things, and I’m expecting you to understand and follow and process the things that I’m saying, you’re going to be begging for me to just take a breath. That’s just what they are, rate and pace.

And, often, what happens is, in a presentation, as speech coaches, these are coachable things. We listen and hear that. Many people are pretty good with rate, not always. Sometimes you got to learn to slow the rate. but pacing is often off. It’s thought, thought, thought, thought, topic, topic, topic. It just keeps going and it is very difficult for listeners to comprehend.

When we don’t change the speech pattern, the speaker can lull listeners into a trance, literally, which is why, for folks who have been in a presentation, and you just sort of zone a little bit, sometimes that is because the speech pattern just does not vary. Speed is one thing we can look at to do that. The other ones, such as volume, that doesn’t work for everybody. We look at volume or stress or inflection. Volume, volume. Stress, we stretch a word out somehow. Or the inflection, the tone, somehow, we make a change, and that draws attention.

Let me give you an example. If I were to say to you, “Good speech is good business,” every word has about the same stress and same volume and same meaning, so it’s up to you, the listener, to hear the words, process that, and understand my meaning, and for the most part you can do that. That’s actually pretty profound.

As a species, we have figured out how to take thought and then control these articulators here, the vocal folds, or our breathing where sound comes from, and then the articulators, the teeth, the tongue, the lips, things like that, and shape the sound and the noises we make so another human can hear those sounds, decode it, and now they have the same thought that we had. I mean, it’s pretty profound when you think about that. No wonder there’s so much room for miscommunication, misunderstanding.

When I say, “Good speech is good business,” I’m making you work a little harder. A moment ago, I told you we speak at about 183 words per minute. We can think at like 600 words per minute so, therefore, there’s like 400 or so words a minute doing other stuff all the time. Even right now while I’m talking, people can hear me but in the back of their minds, they may be thinking, “Oh, I got to get that email out. He’s a second-generation coach, what is that? Oh, my goodness.” There are all sorts of dialogue happening in our minds while people are talking.

So, when I say, “Good speech is good business,” I am making you use that 400 words a minute to hear the words, decode the words, and understand the meaning. Okay, fine. Fine. Listen to how the meaning changes when I add color, one of the four horsemen, when I add color to one of the words, “Good speech is good business.” I’m going to change a few times. Let me do these three or four times. Listen to how the meaning changes, “Good speech is good business.” “Good speech is good business.” “Good speech is good business.” “Good speech is good business.”

Can you hear how the meanings slightly changes depending on where I’m adding the inflection or stress or changing?

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s fun how that works because sometimes I play around with that just for fun in terms of like a given sentence or a joke, and see how it feels different. And I think, as you discussed these principles, the speaker that comes to mind for me is the late Jim Rohn. His voice has such music in it. And I think he’s a master in that it’s like it’s almost too much, but not. And so, I just think it’s a great example of this is what it sounds like when you bring a lot of that color into it in terms of it does feel musical. It’s like I wish I could give a great quote but I actually think about how Jim Rohn might say it, it’s like, “Good speech is good business,” in terms of it’s like, “Ooh, we’ve got a lot of kind of flair on that.”

Ethan Becker
So, interestingly, here’s where sort of like in the world of theater, a director might work with an actor or actress on this, but that’s their profession doing this. So, this is one reason why we’re not big fans of bringing theater ideas into the business world because, in many cases, the folks we’re working with, they don’t have that level of time, understanding, background, history. There are many, many people that we work with who, maybe they are a scientist, for instance, and they were trained, in fact, graded poorly if they added emphasis as they did a report.

A classic example, so we work with a lot of life science companies, as an example. These are companies that maybe they already have their first hundred million dollars, but now they’re looking to raise the next round of funding. They’re looking for 200 million or 300 million, and the senior leadership team are a collection of incredibly smart scientists who have come from the academic space, and they will present, “We have a drug that will cure cancer.” Aristotle would refer to that as a logos approach, a very sort of not a lot of variation in the voice. And in their world, that gives them credibility in the scientific world if they were at a conference, if they were speaking to academics. And if they took a TED Talk-style, forget it. they would be laughed out of the room.

This is why we say, “Don’t just talk like TED in the world of business place. There’s a time and a place for that style as incredibly effective, which is really just the conference style.” But you take that style to like a boardroom, no way. Or, for these scientists, the challenge for them is, “How do I, as a scientist, who was trained to not show any emotion when I am talking about even something that is significant?” They need to learn how to add emphasis in a way that is effective. And we all look different, we sound different, they don’t have to talk like Tony Robbins or something. They don’t have to do that. You don’t have to, to be incredible.

They can take and keep their current style and just learn how to adapt and amend certain words that emphasize the point, and, bam, it will pop. Their listeners will tune right in. And what makes this authentic is they are spending the time, saying, “Whoa, what do I actually mean in any given sentence? What is the point?” But then they got to actually do the practicing of it. Learning it is easy. Practicing it, it’s not hard, you just got to do the work. You just got to do it, that’s all. Anyway, it’s a lot of fun. All this stuff is a lot of fun.

There are other environments where you got to take a different approach but we’re not all the same. We look different, sound different. This is why it ain’t one size fits all. You just can’t do it that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Ethan Becker
My mom always used to say, “Be sure that your brain is engaged before putting your mouth into gear.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Ethan Becker
I like Getting to Yes by Fisher and Ury. I like Good to Great, excellent book, Jim Collins. The third one would be, oh, The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense by Suzette Haden. Elgin, she changed her name, but that’s a great one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Ethan Becker
A favorite tool would be taking a time out to practice.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with readers; they tend to quote it back to you frequently?

Ethan Becker
Yeah, getting good at step number two. That’s probably one of the things we get a lot of feedback on. Most folks have not thought about step two, “Tell why listen,” and they will…As you get good at that, the quality of their presentations really change. Not just the quality of the presentation, the attention span of the listener changes significantly when you get good at it and it feels authentic. None of this stuff is like gimmick stuff. This is all real. This is all how you do it.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Ethan Becker
Well, you can go to SpeechImprovement.com is the website. You can find me on LinkedIn, Dr. Ethan Becker. We do have an app that’s pretty cool. This is a free app. It’s called Speech Companion that has a great summary of the four-step outline, inductive, deductive, ethos, pathos, logos, with examples of phrases and language. It’s a tool we developed a while back. We actually wrote the code from scratch in-house here, which was a lot of fun to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Ethan Becker
Yeah, as you’re listening to people, begin to notice how other people are communicating. Do they like their general information up front or at the end? And as you start to do that, you’re going to start to find that’s just one area you’ll be able to connect with them much more effectively.

Pete Mockaitis
Ethan, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck in all of your communications.

Ethan Becker
Thanks, Pete. I appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis
Erica, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Erica Dhawan
Thank you so much for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about Digital Body Language, but, first, I want to hear a little bit about your body of work in the realm of Bollywood dancing. What is the story here for you?

Erica Dhawan
I grew up as a shy and introverted girl in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and for most of my life, I struggled to find my voice. You couldn’t even realize I was there. Every teacher from kindergarten to 12th grade often said, “Erica is very studious and gave me straight As,” but every teacher had the same feedback, “I wish Erica spoke more in class.”

One of the things though that I loved and that really allowed me to connect with others was dancing. And coming from an Indian background, one of my biggest passions is Bollywood dancing. But with my passion and my work around connection and my research around how we really connect in today’s world, I found that so much of it comes not just through our heads but through our hearts.

And so, some of the things I love to do is not only Bollywood dance myself, but bring the spirit of dance and movement to my audiences as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, fun. So, then let’s talk now about body language, or specifically digital body language. You’ve got this book here about digital body language. Can you share with us what’s perhaps the most surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discovery you made along the way as you were putting this together?

Erica Dhawan
One of the things, or knacks, that allowed me to find my voice, beyond just dance, was understanding body language and the importance of it to build connections. But as I used the power of body language to get great competitive jobs and accelerate in my career, I started noticing something over the last few years that was pervading workplaces and people’s family lives – there was no rulebook for how we showed body language in a digital world.

And it led me for the last four years to study what I called digital body language, which are the new cues and signals that we send in our digital communication that really make the subtext of our messages, whether it’s punctuation, response times, how we sign up an email, to how we showed up on a video call.

One of the most surprising things that I learned while writing my book Digital Body Language is I originally wrote it thinking that it was really an additive benefit or skill in addition to traditional body language. It was something you need once you learned the basics of traditional body language. But what I really realized, as we’ve unlocked our digital shift over the past year, is that digital body language is now changing the way we use traditional body language.

My research is showing that even when we work face to face, moving forward, we are more likely to look down on our phones multiple times, to miss the lean-in in a sales conversation, to think in bullet points and expect others to speak in bullet points, and we are missing a lot of the traditional cues of the head nod, the lean in, the direct eye contact that we used to have. So, digital body language is not just how you show up on a video screen or how you send emails, it is truly changing how we make others feel not only online but even in live meetings in our new normal.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so there’s a lot in there, and that’s exciting. So, you talked about the word rulebook so I want to dig into lots of the precise do’s and don’ts and the implications of them. But before we go there, could you maybe share with us a story about someone who’s able to transform their digital body language and see some cool results from that?

Erica Dhawan
One of the best examples from my own research on digital body language that I feature in my book is about a leader named Kelsey. She works at a large company, and Kelsey is someone who really cares about her people and leading her team. But one of the things that she got was some negative feedback through a performance review that her empathy was weak.

And I started coaching Kelsey, and when I started working with her, I started to look at all the typical markers of subpar empathy: poor listening skills, lack of engagement. And I found that Kelsey was actually fantastic at all these things. She showed her team that she was engaged in the room with them. She would ask for their input repetitively. She would try to bring in her introverts and her extroverts. But I realized what was missing was a whole new set of things that weren’t the traditional cues of empathy.

She would look down at her phone multiple times during meetings, multitasking, or signaling to her team that she wasn’t necessarily always paying attention, thinking that it was important to be responsive, not realizing that was impacting how her team felt valued. She would send one-liner emails that were brief and no context, thinking that she was responsive but actually had a major impact on her team not having a clear understanding of what they needed to do next.

Another thing she was doing was repetitively canceling meetings at the last minute, and her team would feel devalued. So, while Kelsey’s traditional body language was actually quite good around empathy, her digital body language was abysmal. So, we did a few things to really help solve some of these challenges. The first thing we did, and I’ll describe them as sort of three tenets of digital body language, is follow one of the first tenets, which is what I call reading messages carefully is the new listening.

Instead of rushing to respond to things, she took a second, thought before she typed, and would send all her messages to her team with clear response expectations, made sure that she could read it a second time for not only what she was thinking in her head but how others may interpret her messages, especially some of her junior employees.

The second thing that she did, which was critical, is she practiced the tenet that I call hold your horses, which means less haste equals more speed. So, she focused on not rewarding the fastest person to respond in her team meetings but the most thoughtful ideas. And the way that she did this was she started to send agendas before those meetings. She was more thoughtful instead of chronically canceling.

And she had said, “Before the meeting, I want you all to think about these questions.” And then, in the team meeting, she had everyone go around and share their responses. And now, in video calls, she had everyone share in the chat tool so that they weren’t turn-taking and then she would call on the people that had the most different ideas. This allowed her to avoid that culture of group think and create that thoughtfulness.

And then the last thing she did is she was more thoughtful about how her team could find their voice especially in different medium. She found that sometimes, while she was really good with introverts and extroverts face to face, sometimes in digital mediums, they needed more engagement. So, she had a rule where she said, “If you have an idea that isn’t in this meeting on Monday, I want you to send it to me on Friday.”

And what it would do was it would force her to think, it would force her to not just reward the quickest person to respond, and it would allow her introverts to actually bring their best ideas to the table. So, those are just some quick examples of how what we all knew what was implicit in traditional body language, now has to be explicit in our digital body language.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. So, there’s a lot of specifics right there in terms of do’s and don’ts to bear in mind. So, let’s zoom right in to some more of those in terms of what are some key do’s and don’ts that you see all the time and make a world of impact when we make an adjustment there?

Erica Dhawan
Let’s start with the do’s. The first do is value others visibly by valuing their time. Don’t chronically cancel, send agendas, be thoughtful of people’s time. The new art of respect is honoring people’s time, inboxes, and schedules. So, so much of this is really around watching the clock of starting meetings, ending meetings on time, acknowledging those differences, and showing that you recognize others and value their time and engagement with you. There’s so much hidden costs in the emails we send back and forth.

The second do is to communicate carefully. Take a moment to think before you type. Another story I’ll share is I once had a client who sent a message to his boss Tom that said, “Do you want to speak Wednesday or Thursday,” and Tom’s response was, “Yes.” Now, Tom was probably rushing, he thought it wouldn’t offend his colleague, but reading carefully is listening, and writing clearly is empathy, so communicate carefully.

The third do is collaborate with confidence and understand that confidence today is being consistent in your messages. You don’t want to create cultures where people have to chase you down, and being consistent. Even if you don’t have any answer but having a cadence for following up matters more than ever.

And the fourth do is trust others and assume positive intent. Especially in a digital body language world, there are cases where we get all caps emails, we’re feeling someone is shouting at us. Or those emojis that feel a bit passive-aggressive, stay in the place of reason, don’t get emotionally hijacked, and choose thoughtfulness, and giving others a benefit of the doubt.

Now let me give you three don’ts.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, if I could just, because you said emojis, and that was on my list, so let’s just go there. So, emojis can come across as passive-aggressive. How do we think about emojis at work in terms of like, “Never use them,” or, “Use them freely,” or, “Use them only under these circumstances”? What’s your take?

Erica Dhawan
So, emojis are like our true body language facial expressions. And they do bring emotion, nuance, and tone to digital messages that are absent of the body language which makes up roughly 75% of nonverbal communication. I recommend using emojis carefully and knowing your audience when you’re using emojis.

Emojis can actually provide great benefit. They can showcase happiness. They can showcase gratitude with your team. The best way to decide when you should use emojis, how many you should use, how carefully you should use them, is by answering two questions. The first question is, “How much do you trust this person?” If there’s high trust, don’t be shy. Use your authenticity and maybe throw in that emoji. If there’s low trust, maybe be careful. First, mirror the other person’s formality, and then decide when might be that right moment to sprinkle in an emoji.

The second question to answer is, “How much of a power gap is between the two of you?” Is this a CEO who’s in their 60s and you’ve never met in person that you’re sending an email to, or is this a cousin or a friend? These simple things will help you decide power and trust levels whether to infuse that emotion or not. I would say that over the last year, we’ve seen a much higher degree of using the power of emojis and I really encourage it to show your authenticity, again, in places where there is high trust and little differentiation in power dynamics.

I’d also say that we’re seeing a lot more senior leaders throwing in those emojis or two, and I think that it can be really great to infuse a sense of emotion or connection. There are times where you’ll want to make sure you avoid them, sensitive periods where there’s difficulties, situations where…

Pete Mockaitis
“You’re firing 20,000 people…” yeah, I hear you. There’s sort of heavy gravitas elements that the emoji brings a lightness to, a lightness that ought not to be brought to that sort of thing. I wanted to ask, you talked about the power gap in the senior leaders. If you are the more senior person, does that kind of nudge you towards feeling more free to use emojis in communication with the junior folks as a means of making things seem lighter, freer, more open? Or, is it…? What’s your take there?

Erica Dhawan
I think that senior leaders have a great opportunity to sprinkle in that emoji or two to actually create connections. In my research, what I found is that we are all in different wavelengths of digital body language. On one end, there are digital natives, people that are very savvy in these tools, they grew up using emojis in high school, in college. And then digital adopters are the other category. These are people that are learning the new road of digital body language as we go. They never used an emoji for 20 years in workplace culture, and then they might start to try this, which feels like a big leap for them.

To give you a similar parallel example. My father is a digital adopter and I’m a digital native, and when my father sends me a text message, it starts with “Dear Erica,” and ends with “Love, Dad,” and I just scroll through it because it’s as long as a letter, and I haven’t quite taught him that a text is not a letter. But we have to understand that maybe some of our senior leaders are similar to my father. They’re new to these things.

And so, check your own bias. If you’re a leader, sprinkle in an emoji or two. It may actually bring more connection with your teams but know that there are some things that actually may go too far. One head of HR that I interviewed said that she remembers a moment when she changed her communications from an exclamation point to an emoji, and it was like a rite of passage, and it was a big deal. Whereas, for maybe a millennial or a Gen Z, it’s like a simple thing to use every day.

The other thing she learned though is she wrote adorbs, like adorable, but adorbs in an email with one of her millennial coworkers, she is a Gen Xer. And that millennial said, like, “I was uncomfortable with adorbs because you put it an email, and I feel like email is formal. And to you, email was actually more informal.” And so, not only do digital adopters and digital natives have different styles around when to use these punctuation or symbols, but even they have different norms around where to use them by channel.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, and it sounds like you’re sharing some really great principles here which are, in many ways, universal, but in some other ways individuals are going to have their own particular preferences, proclivities, nuances, and that’s just how they are. Like, that would not have even occurred to me. Like, “Email is a more formal channel. I prefer not to hear adorbs.” I guess I’m…how old am I again? I’m 37.

Erica Dhawan
You may be more of a digital native. And I find that it’s not just age-based. I know 50-year-olds that are digital natives at heart and 35-year-olds that want perfect punctuation in text messages. One fun fact is a research study showed that if you put a period at the end of a text, certain Americans will think you’re angry or passive-aggressive, other Americans will think you’re just using good grammar. And that’s just a very good example of how, similar to emojis, we are not all the same. We are all learning the brave new world of digital body language, so it’s important to check our bias to not read into things, and to really give others the benefit of the doubt.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, let’s talk about not reading into things. We’re going to talk about the don’ts here, so let’s start with that one and maybe hear a few more don’ts. Let’s just say our brain just start to go, like, “Wow, what’s up with that text, or Slack, or email that just said, ‘Okay.’ Are they mad at me? Did I screw up? Do they think that I’m trying to undermine them?” So, anyway, our brains just make up these stories and they go running. How should we deal with the internal game when that pops up for us?

Erica Dhawan
So, with the lack of that tone and body language, if you get that message and you see that someone is on the verge of tears, you know that they have good intent but if you can’t see any of those cues, it’s easy to get lost in our minds, caught up in rumination or paranoia. So, here’s a couple things that you shouldn’t do when you get that message.

The first thing you should not do is you should not respond immediately with another passive-aggressive, not react with a more passive-aggressiveness. Instead, stay in the place of reason, sleep on it. I like to call it the pregnant email pause. Sleep on it overnight and come back to it when you’re not as emotionally hijacked. You’ll come back to it refreshed. If you want to write something back, maybe draft it, and then come back to it later.

Another thing that you can do is just pick up the phone. Don’t use email back and forth if it’s not really working for you anymore. Know when it’s important to pick up the phone. I like to say a phone call is worth a thousand emails and there are certain cases where it matters more than ever to do that. That’s the first big don’t.

Pete Mockaitis
And to that point about the phone call, I think that that’s so…it is so powerful and it can be worth a thousand emails in the sense of kind of upstream and downstream in terms of positive or negative. And like when you call, and you say, “Hey, we said okay. I was wondering if maybe we’re thinking X, Y, Z.” And then maybe that can open up a really important emotional conversation, like, “You know, I’m sorry. I’m really stressed about these things. You’re doing a really great job. I’ve been really short with people.” And then you just really strengthen that relationship because you were able to go there. Or you can just have a quick laugh, like, “Oh, no. No, I didn’t mean that at all. No, that’s funny. We’re all good.”

Erica Dhawan
Yeah, someone is trying to be funny and it didn’t go well online.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it’s like that, even if there’s nothing there, taking the time to make the phone call can just go miles in terms of enriching that relationship, so I love it.

Erica Dhawan
That’s absolutely right.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.

Erica Dhawan
And digital body language is just as much about knowing when to have the video call, the phone call, the live meeting, the email, or the IM, or the text as it is, what we say in each of those mediums. I like to say the choice of communication medium is like the new measure of priority, complexity, and urgency. If it’s really urgent, know when to send a text or make that quick call versus an email. If it’s high complex, it’s very important to know when to have that video call with nuance, with SlideShare, or send a detailed email. And if you’re familiar with this person, knowing when you can just pick up the phone versus sending the long email, or where you have to work with their assistant to schedule something on a calendar.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Great. Thank you. Let’s hear some more don’ts now.

Erica Dhawan
Don’t multitask. Multitasking is rampant right now. We are all feeling not only Zoom gloom but constant fatigue, endless emails. What I really recommend to avoid this just endless feeling, like we’re constantly in meetings, and we have to multitask to just get through the day, is initiate what I call the Zoom BCC just as much as we do the email BCC.

If you’re in a lot of meetings, if they could be shorter meetings, first have less meetings. Instead of making them 30 minutes, make them 25 minutes, then you’ll see you can make them 20 minutes. And then if you have a lot of people on there that don’t need to be on there anymore, initiate a BCC rule on Zoom where you can loop people out just like we do on email. This will really avoid multitasking and really get individuals engaged.

If you’re in a meeting where you feel like you want to multitask because you’re not being engaged, start the meeting with, “What’s the agenda here and how can I help?” Be proactive to make sure that you’re valued, otherwise you don’t need to be there, versus feeling a fear or guilt. And if you’re the host of that meeting, always start with, “Here’s what’s success looks like. Here’s why I need all of your input. And if we’re able to get through this in 15 minutes, then we’ll end 10 minutes early.” Simple things like that will quickly avoid multitasking which is, as we all know, is pretty rampant.

The last thing I think is important is just don’t constantly be in a rush. We are living in a world where rush responses are often prioritized, as I said earlier, over thoughtfulness. Take the moment to really reflect on, “What is a working session that really needs group thinking versus group think?” instead of just saying, “We need to talk next Tuesday because that’s the next opening on our calendar.”

We are not robots and we can’t live or adhere to what our Outlook or our Gmail calendar is saying. We need to think about what will best serve the task at hand, and how we as humans need to process ideas and think through things before we actually jump from meeting to meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
And, in practice, if I want to implement this Zoom BCC action, how would I go about pulling that off?

Erica Dhawan
One of the best ways you can initiate the Zoom BCC is have a rule in the chat box on a video call when individuals do not need to engage anymore or they filled their part of the meeting, just write, “BCC: Sam, John, and Mary,” and then they have the liberty to BCC out of the meeting. That’s just a simple way to do it. I love the power of the video call chat tools because you’re avoiding turn-taking and allowing individuals to engage all at the same time.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, just for any listeners who aren’t quite picking up what we’re putting down and intricate for my understanding. Erica, when you say BCC, it’s much like when in an email we perhaps move the person who introduced us, like Dorie Clark introduced us, thanks, Dorie, we move them to BCC such that they are not privy to all of the back-and-forth subsequent emails about scheduling or whatever that we’re doing. And so, we’re using that as a shorthand then within the Zoom chat to say, “Hey, thanks for that which you have contributed. If you would like to exit now, you’re free to do so.”

Erica Dhawan
Exactly right.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. And so, it’s kind of nice as a cultural shorthand, they’d say, “Oh, okay. Got it.” Just like, “That happens in email, that’s what’s happening now, and I appreciate you respecting my time, Erica, and giving that back to me and I’m going to go do my thing.” Or they might say, “No, actually, this is riveting stuff and I really want to see what happens and I’m excited to contribute a few more ideas,” then, by all means, you stick around and it’s all good.

Erica Dhawan
Absolutely. And I think that’s the opportunity here. What we’re often finding is what happens when people don’t feel like they’re contributing anymore, they start multitasking on the call, and then people see that, and then other people multitask, and it just creates a disengaged scenario. And so, really being thoughtful about this can go a long way.

And, again, we are living in the wild, wild west of how we innovate around digital body language, so use your own creativity. With some of my clients who have read the book Digital Body Language and we’ve run workshops we’ve initiated email acronyms. For example, on subject lines, leaders are using 2H which means “I need this in two hours,” or, 4D which means, “I need this in four days” so that person doesn’t feel that like they have to rush; they have four days to actually think about it and then come up with the best product.

Another example of an email is one of my favorite acronyms NNTR which means “No need to respond.” That simple email acronym can avoid 15 thank you emails or okay emails. And this is not trivial, it’s actually valuing other’s time right now. Another one of my favorites is ROM which means “Respond on Monday,” especially if you’re a senior leader who’s sending an email on a Sunday, you don’t want to blast your team member’s weekend. Let them know ROM that they can respond on Monday. That can go a long way not only for you to get better ideas from them but foster wellbeing.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly, yeah. And it’s just very clear because it’s ambiguous, they say, “This doesn’t seem super urgent but then, again, why are you sending it to me on a Saturday or a Sunday? And maybe you just had a good creative spark or maybe it is urgent and I can’t quite tell even if I’ve spent that couple minutes trying to figure out if it is or not urgent by reading between the lines.” It’d be great just to have that clarity at first, like, “Oh, I don’t even need to open this subject line that’s tantalizing me because see that acronym. That’s great.” Thank you.

When it comes to multitasking, I just want to get your take about how you say we see other people multitasking on like a Zoom call, and then that just sort of brings down the energy and the commitment focus level from others.

And I think what’s funny, I think most of us notice but some of us don’t apparently, which is that we can tell when you’re multitasking because we can hear the clicking, or if you’re in a Mac or something, like the “thunk, thunk, thunk” trackpad clicks, or see your eyeballs they’re like reading texts elsewhere kind of on the screen as opposed to listening to the person. And so, even with the mutes or whatever, there are many ways it becomes clear that you’re multitasking. So, public announcement there, we know you’re multitasking. So, that’s there if you didn’t already know that.

Can you tell me what are some of the other telltale signs of that? And how does that bring down the energy of the group?

Erica Dhawan
I think that your example was brilliant. It is obvious when individuals are multitasking versus when they’re actually engaging in a conversation. And if you just write even just like, “Oh, I agree” in a chat, it’s kind of like, “Okay, are you really listening?” versus sending something thoughtful around what was just said that will proactively contribute to the conversation and adds to it.

I want to answer this in a few ways. First, I’ll answer “What are some of the common cues of multitasking?” but then I want to answer, “If you are the meeting host, how do you avoid this from happening from those attending your meeting?”

So, common cues of multitasking, people are just not on video even though that you asked for people to be on video, or most of the people are on video. I think that there are reasons people aren’t on video, but if it is a meeting where everyone else is on video, take a second to think about the fact that other people may think you’re multitasking even if you’re not.

Another cue is just never looking into the camera at all and always looking down or somewhere else. A research study showed that making eye contact happens about 30% to 60% when we’re face to face. In body language, we want to actually, when we’re speaking, look into the camera about 60% to 70% of the time. Even though we can’t see everyone, they can feel a connection with us, so it does really help. The third is being someone who, when you’re called on, is sort of like, “Oh, what do we need again?” or, “Can you say this again?” Those are great examples of just the multitasking phenomenon that is existing.

So, how do you overcome some of these challenges if you’re a meeting host? Number one, before the meeting, I like to say the meeting calendar invite is like the new first impression. It sets the agenda for how people will behave in your meeting. So, in that meeting invite, have a clear meeting title, have an agenda, write in there some norms, “We’d like to have everyone on video. If you can’t join on video, let me know beforehand that you can’t.” Like, instead of creating the opt-in, create the opt-out of, “Here are the norms,” and people are automatically engaged more.

In your agenda, identify ways where you can actually solicit other individuals to lead parts of the meeting or to be prepared to speak around specific questions that you want them to discuss. Then, at the beginning of your meeting, when everyone is on, actually start with, “Here’s the agenda. I’m going to call on people randomly.” Encourage that. Just like we did in an office. Like, we don’t have to be polite. This is how we meet. And simple things like that will change behavior as well as using the chat tools, say, “I’d like everyone, as we’re discussing this, to share their responses in the chat. We’re going to wait till everyone shares in the chat. And then I’ll call on people that have different perspectives.”

And this is a great way as well for people to just pay attention and make sure that you’re truly soliciting that input from everyone. So, those are just some examples. Again, it’s not going to be perfect, but knowing how to engage the group thoughtfully and then knowing when to Zoom BCC them out, because otherwise it will create multitasking, can go a long way and just having great, good body language.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, tell me, Erica, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Erica Dhawan
My new book Digital Body Language is out May 11th. If you want access to some tools around it, if you go to EricaDhawan.com/digitalbodylanguage, I have a digital body language quiz that will help you assess yourself on some of the categories I talked about: valuing others visibly, communicating carefully. It’s free for anyone. And I hope you’ll check it out, take it with your teams, and understand whether you’re a digital native or a digital adapter. 

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Erica, now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Erica Dhawan
My favorite quote is from Maya Angelou, and I’ll share it with you, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” And what I find so inspiring about that is that this is a moment that we can help others feel heard, respected, and understood with digital body language.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now could you share a favorite study or experiment or a bit of research?

Erica Dhawan
I recently ran a study of 2,000 office workers, and one of the greatest insights I found from the study was that the average office worker cited that they were wasting four hours a week on poor, unclear, and confusing digital communication. If we equate that up to the US GDP alone, that is $889 billion in wasted salary alone.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Erica Dhawan
My favorite book, most recently, I have many, is Choose Yourself by James Altucher.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Erica Dhawan
My favorite tool is the Calm app. I really believe in the power of meditation and connecting not only with our minds but our bodies. And I use it every single morning for a quick meditation, and every afternoon for a five-minute meditation.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Erica Dhawan
Yeah, my favorite habit is to wake up every morning and have a big glass of water with a Nuun tablet. Hydration is everything. It has changed my life. And if you are not drinking eight glasses of water, go for it and you will see immense results.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, hydration is actually one of my hobby horses, I guess, so you said it was transformational. Explain.

Erica Dhawan
I was constantly tired for most of my life throughout the day. I’ve been addicted to coffees, teas, chocolates in the afternoon, and after I became a mom of two kids, I have two kids under three years old, I realized that this could not be fixed with caffeine. Caffeine is just another addiction and I needed to change my habits. And so, I started to experiment with lots of different things, but the one that has really worked is just drinking more water. And I found that I don’t love to just drink glasses of water, but I started to use electrolyte tablets, like Nuun and others, and just that simple dose of not feel like water, warm water, but a little more fun goes a long way in helping me hydrate, keep my energy up throughout the day.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Erica Dhawan
In terms of all of my work, I think one of the most important nuggets that has connected most was the quote I shared earlier, “Reading messages carefully is the new listening, and writing clearly is the new empathy.” We are living in a new world of how we connect and build trust. And, as I shared earlier, I think what was implicit from body language now has to be explicit in digital body language. And I think that taking the extra steps to truly show empathy and care with simple actions like these go a long way in connecting.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Erica Dhawan
Folks can learn more on my website at EricaDhawan.com, or my book website EricaDhawan.com/digitalbodylanguage, or you can just check out my Amazon page and find my books there.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Erica Dhawan
To be awesome at your job, it’s critical to get comfortable being uncomfortable, to be willing to ask for help, say what you know, what you don’t know, and be vulnerable, because when you are vulnerable, you’ll create the safe space to allow others to speak up.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Erica, this has been a treat. I wish you lots of luck with the book and your digital body language and your many other adventures.

Erica Dhawan
Thank you so much.

Pete Mockaitis
David, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

David Nihill
Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me all the way from exotic Ireland.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Well, it’s great to have you here and it’s a late night for you a bit, but you say there’s not much to do right now anyway.

David Nihill
Yeah. It was a very early night at 8:45 P.M. back in the days in Ireland before this COVID carry-on but now, with no pubs or bars or alcohol on tap, really, it is a much longer evening with a much earlier bedtime. The time just doesn’t go by as faster or as fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, understood. Well, you’ve got a lot of fun stores. In fact, you’re award-winning at storytelling. We’re going to learn some of your wisdom there and when it comes to being engaging and funny. But, first, could you open us up with the short version of your story of being an impostor?

David Nihill
I did impersonate a business fellow called Irish Dave who just happened to be an established comedian in Ireland, albeit with possibly the worst stage name in history, but nobody seemed to question that when in America so I did pretend to be a comedian called Irish Dave for a full year to try and get over a fear of public speaking in the worst way possible, which was to do standup comedy every single night multiple times a night. And I had a fake website, and I had fake Twitter followers, had Facebook fans at one stage. I was really big in India there for a while, which was slightly interesting despite, sheer of the fact, that you could go on Fiverr.com and buy fans from India at a very discounted price, which is ethically questionable, but definitely it was done. And that’s how we get booked in…

Pete Mockaitis
It’s forbidden in some contracts I’ve signed.

David Nihill
It is forbidden, yeah. Well, I faced no such legal technicalities, thankfully, a few years ago, and it just allowed me to get booked in a bunch of places. I really shouldn’t have been with very little experience and it snowballed and got a little bit out of control.

Pete Mockaitis
What’s so funny, well, in the US, it’s like, “Okay, your name is Dave and you’re Irish so you might be Irish Dave, so.”

David Nihill
By default, yeah. But there’s no way you’re going to turn up in Ireland, where like, “Oh, my God, it’s American Pete.” It will just seem too obvious. But you guys love that stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. That’s fun. That’s fun. And I love, I saw some of your YouTube videos. I love how you make fun of Americans, playfully. The majority of our listeners are in the US but you have people from all over the world, so feel free to let her rip. I love it when folks with accents do an American accent. Can you lay one on us?

David Nihill
Oh, they’re like, “Oh, my gosh, I’ve been doing it recently because in Ireland we have a requirement that you can’t drive more than five kilometers from your house, but technically I’m on vacation from San Francisco right now,” whenever I get pulled over, and it goes horribly wrong because they’d be like, “How many weeks are you here for?” And you’re like, “Three.” And Irish people just cannot pronounce the number three and the police obviously know that, and they’re like, “An American would never nail the word three like that,” and I think that’s what gives me away every time. But, yeah, I definitely have a horrendous range of American people’s accents.

You know, I figured out the hard way that more people speak Spanish probably than English in America, so I was like, “Let me just get my Latino voice down in Spanish.” Actually, the best voice is an American trying to speak Spanish, where it’s like, “Yo quiero un harmbergeza,” and you’re like, “That is not Spanish. You just completely used an American pronunciation there to order a burger.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it might you get you a lot of burgers because I think of a guy, he’s name is Nick, in college, he was from the UK, and he’s like, “Hey, so what do we sound like to you?” He said, “I don’t know. It’s kind of like, ‘Hey, guys, want to grab a burger and fries?” It’s like, “Okay. Thanks.”

David Nihill
And, you know, I must say, I poke fun at America but always in a lovely way. I like it a lot and it’s kind of been my home from my home for like 14-15 years, so it creates some great opportunities. You can’t beat the positive in America.

Like, in Ireland, if I announce to my friends that I was going to try and do standup comedy to get over a fear of public speaking, they would quickly label me an idiot and tell me I was wasting my time, where in America, they’d be like, “You should do that, man. That could be a great learning experience.” It’s a very different approach, and you guys definitely lean on the positive where we lean on the negative.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, let’s talk about it. So, you learn some things the hard way, and you’ve captured some of those learnings in your book, Do You Talk Funny? So, could you just lay it on us, first of all, sort of what do professionals have to learn from comedians when it comes to public speaking?

David Nihill
I think everything because the scary thing is like if you dig into people who teach public speaking or training, you realize that they haven’t clocked up that many hours on stage themselves, so you’re like, “Where are you actually getting this information from that you’ve put together?” They seem to ignore. If you’re a big subscriber to, say, Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 Hours Rule that he popularized that 10,000 hours it takes doing something to make a master, you’re really not going to find any other group other than comedians when you go down that research path that is doing the 10,000 hours and doing it in the most high-pressure environment possible.

Like, there is nothing more difficult than someone who’s paid money for you to make them happy when they’re having a horrible day, and just walking in, sinking a couple of shots, crossing their arms, and going, “Hey, idiot, entertain me.” That is horrendous. And imagine you do that night after night. Like, they estimate it takes comedians about seven years on average to be able to make a full-time income from comedy, and that pretty much pans out, in my experience, as accurate. That’s kind of putting two to three to four hours into your craft most days over a period of seven years. That is a very large amount of learning in a very painful way.

And the thing is, “What did they learn the hard way on that journey?” And most of the time it’s just a more succinct entertaining form of storytelling that you’re missing in the average world of any snooze fest corporate presentation, or even more so at the moment. Like, virtual meetings are scaring the life out of people emotionally where someone with an imaginary sombrero sitting in front of a background of a place they’ve never been to.

There was a guy on a call the other day with me, and he was sitting on a virtual toilet in the middle of the call, I was like, “That’s not good. Just make it stop now.” So, never on Earth have you had such an opportunity to stand out in such an easy way by doing something a little bit different and open the engagement in all your talks. Like, all you have to do, if you’re the average listener, is take four or five stories that you absolutely love to tell. They’re the ones that when you go to a college reunion or a work meetup with colleagues you just kind of forgotten about or haven’t seen in years, and they’re like, “Oh, Pete, you’ve got to tell that story. That’s the one. Tell it.” And you’re like, “Oh, come on, I tell the story every Christmas when we meet up for beers.”

But every one of us has those three, four, five core stories that we kind of forget about, that for some reason, when it comes to business public speaking, we abandon them. And we’d be much better off if we just rewrote them, change the word order ever so slightly, so we’d borrow something from the world of standup comedy which would be the structure to tell the story, i.e., start in the action, know what you’re going to say last, know the key point or the key funny bit and go your way to make that the very last word. That’s what makes your timing look really good. And, actually, try writing it out or listen to yourself giving that story and have it transcribed if you hate listening back to yourself, like most people do.

So, we use a tool like Rev.com and just put it on a script, and go. Well, I say a lot of waffle unnecessary words when I’m telling that story. Imagine I was a comedian and I only had a short time period to work with, “Could I tell that big long-winded story in one minute? And if I could, what would be the words that I use?” And just look at it because it just forces you to be concise.

Most people, like in business, where it’s like, “Let me share a story with you,” and most of us are like, “Oh, my God, I’m out of here because this is going to be terrible.” We love storytelling, but once they telegraph the intention to try and tell it in an environment where we’re not expecting it, we’re kind of go, “Oh, I’m out of here.” But it’s just little things like that. Like, a comedian never say, “Now, I’ve got a joke for you.” They just tell you a joke. So, it’s by telegraphing your intentions, you naturally change the expectations for something. And I think the world of business just gets so many of those things wrong in business presentations that comedians would never get wrong.

Do you ever go to a comedy club or like a business event? If you go to it, you’ll hear them do an introduction for a speaker. And most business speakers in presentations don’t realize that when you’re in a meeting, or you’re giving a speech, or you’re speaking at a conference, that your talk starts with your introduction. It does not start when you start speaking. So, a comedian knows that, and a comedy club knows that, so they use that to capture some sort of an anticipation and buildup and excitement and guarantee that they get everyone’s attention to get the speaker a round of applause and off to the best possible start.

So, if you go to…they’re around the Bay Area, there’s a conference called TechCrunch Disrupt, and they’d be like, “Our next speaker is Brian. Brian is a serious A investor in Call Comm. Brian has invested in capital stock. And Brian and me used to go skiing together. We were really early at this particular company. Brian is a really great standup guy. Welcome, Brian.” Everyone knows it’s Brian. We don’t care. We’re not really tuned in anymore. It’s gone on for too long.

But in a comedy club, you’re going to hear them, “Ladies and gentlemen, your next comedian just opened for Jerry Seinfeld. His comedy album has debuted number one on iTunes. He’s currently streaming on Netflix. Please welcome,” and the key word, which is the name is only said once, only said last, and that gets people’s attention because they’re asking, “Oh, who is it?” And then when you say the name, they’re naturally trained to clap. And then the whole talk gets off to a great start because you don’t have to sell yourself as the business speaker. You can give your introduction to someone, give them three key points, in that way your audience is like, “Oh, you can just come out and be yourself.”

In nearly every presentation you go to in the world of business, it doesn’t start like that because they just don’t know anything about the world of standup comedy and they ignore comedians as a source of wisdom. So, that’s what I went very deep into but it’s just the small things that make a huge difference.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I love it. You’ve already dropped specific tactics that are right there in terms of what is at the very end and how you build some anticipation, and that’s really good. I’d love it if maybe we could zoom out a bit and hear sort of, I guess, maybe, fundamentally, what makes something funny or engaging? Like, it’s kind of hard for me to pin down, like, why is one thing funny and another thing not funny?

David Nihill
Yeah. Well, funny is a subjective one. When you’re trying to bake funny content, always start with fun and so you can turn fun into funny and then you don’t have much of a failure. Also, if you attach to it that you’re never trying to tell a joke, you’re trying to tell a funny story, and the key word, the key with the funny just happens to be at the end. So, by moving that to the end, you’re maximizing people’s chances of reaction to it.

Then you’re taking a bit of pressure off yourself to be funny because no one knows you were trying to be funny in any way. The engaging comes from storytelling. Number one, always start with a story but do one very key thing. Allow the listener to see themselves in your shoes. That’s what makes it engaging. So, the audience, whatever story you’re telling is not about you, it’s about the audience. So, if you’re talking about your own mother, they’re picturing their mother. If you’re talking about the car that you had that was a beat-up car, that was your first car, and it was red and the exhaust pipe was hanging off, and it was a 1979 whatever it was, the minute you start talking about it, they start picturing their own car in their own head. So, you’re automatically trying to make the storytelling process visual, and your job as an engaging storyteller is to make that easy for people.

So, any of the key details, if it’s a nice one, it has a color. If it’s a person, it has a name, and that gives the signals that, “This is important. Pay attention.” You have a couple little twists when you’re trying to be engaging. You have to keep people hooked and you do it CSI-style. Remember that TV show? It was a bit scary back in the day. The minute you turned it on, you know, there’s a police investigation. The minute you turned it on, someone was dead, and in 10 seconds somebody was on fire, there was like a cat and a hippo, and you’re like, “What is going on in this thing?”

Pete Mockaitis
Something falls out of a window to their…

David Nihill
Exactly. They’re dead. “Who killed this priest and why is he dead within 10 seconds? Well, I better hang around and find out.” And that’s the natural curiosity with engaging stories that it does not start chronologically. You’re not walking through somebody through your LinkedIn bio or your resume or your job experience. You got to grab them right in the middle in the action. So, you never start off by, say, you’re climbing a mountain, you never want to talk about your mental decision to climb that mountain. You want to start near the summit of the mountain. Is there a chance you’re going to make the top? I don’t know. And then you change some of the key words when you’re telling that story to make them into present tense.

So, you never want to say, “I was on the side of the mountain, looking at the top.” It’s like, “I’m standing looking at the summit of the mountain and I can’t feel my feet anymore.” People are like, “Whoa, what’s happening?” And this changes the dynamics of the story instantly. So, if you listen to Snap Judgment, or NPR, or some of the award-winning storytelling podcasts, you’ll hear every one of those guys change the wording of the stories to the present tense because that brings it to life. And within it they’re going to be using a lot of comedic techniques like they will try and build in triple sets anytime they can, which is just basically coupling elements into groups of three, that number that Irish people cannot pronounce.

But three is the smallest number of elements that your mind needs to create and recognize a pattern. And all comedians and great gifted storytellers are doing is usually just breaking that pattern and that makes content memorable because three is easy to remember. But if I say, one, two, four, it’s only retrospectively that you can figure out that I was multiplying the numbers. So, it appears that I’m ahead of you a little bit. So, I always would give an audience apples, apples, oranges. When Chris Rock was talking about…he had a joke that’s a bit dated now, but it was like, “Women, all they need to survive is air, food, and compliments.” I mean, that’s not hugely amazing stuff and it’s dated now and it’s referenced, obviously, but it does demonstrate clearly that pattern is one, two, four.

And when you’re storytelling, people who incorporate those things, link the start to the finish, put the key words at the end and start in the action, use key details, colors, and names, people just see themselves within the story, and that’s what makes it engaging.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Wow, this so much good stuff, so fast. I’m loving it.

David Nihill
Yeah. Sorry, got excited there.

Pete Mockaitis
No, bring it more.

David Nihill
That’s kind of the tactical side of it. But there isn’t much more to it than that. Like, people have courses on storytelling, and you’re like, “Stop with your four-day seminar on storytelling.” This is an innate human thing that we all know how to do. We just don’t all know how to do it in the most succinct form possible. So, it’s just consciously editing out all those details that don’t need to be in there. And you, yourself, identifying the key point of the story, and go, “I know this one.” I tell this in a pub. Friend of my friends laugh. Like, when I tell this at the dinner table, “Where is the biggest reaction moment and what do people remember or what can they say back to me?” And you just need to take out words to get to those points quicker.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, all right. So, now, in your book, you lay out seven principles. We’ve already kind of hit a few of them here in terms of having it start right in the middle of things with a story. Can you walk us through some of the other key principles that we haven’t touched on yet?

David Nihill
Yes. My favorite by a mile is to build in a technique called a callback. And the beauty of a callback is, and this is for job interviews, for meetings, a callback is killer. It is simply a reference to something that was said in the moment that couldn’t have been pre-scripted or planned. It was enjoyable between you and that other person, and it looks extremely spontaneous.

So, in the world of storytelling or comedy, a comedian, Dave Chappelle is known for using a lot of callbacks where he’ll drop something at the start and he’s always going to come back to it later on. And a great story will always have the same thing. In the book, it’s called bookending technique. In a movie, where they drop something at the start, they put in some clues, and they’re always going to come back to it.

And just in the world of general presentation, you’re in a meeting, you’re in a job interview, you’re on a sales call, you can use this stuff daily. I was on a call the other day trying to pitch someone from Salesforce, and I knew through research, we had mutual friends who organize a pretty wacky party in San Francisco where they all dress up around Christmas as elves. All parties in San Francisco are kind of wacky, in fairness, given they’re half naked going around in a bicycle from some Burning Man calls that you didn’t really know. Now, I remember all of a sudden. I definitely have those nights up.

I was chatting to them and they knew about this elf party organized by one of their colleagues. So, at the end of the call, I’m like, “Well, listen, I look forward to speaking to you next week. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll shoot you an email. Worst-case scenario, I’ll see you at an elf party.” So, even in that conversation that would’ve taken place on a call, you know it’s got the rule of three, it’s got the triple set, it’s got the flip at the end of it, and it’s got the callback, the reference to the joke that was already shared between a couple of people.

So, I had to give a TEDx Talk, a very short notice, about a year ago and it ended up in front of like 2,400 people. And I’m sitting in the audience, which is a key cool thing a comedian can do sometimes, and any business speaker should do is watch the people before you. How many times in life have you seen a business speaker go on and talk about and referenced something that somebody else just talked about? And you’re like, “Well, you’re not even listening to the last person. Like, they already said this.”

So, I would always sit in the audience and just watch what’s happening before me. And I remember this lady standing there, and she’s just come on the stage, and she hasn’t got much of an introduction, nobody really knows her background. And there’s a smoke machine and it’s clearly broken because there’s way too much smoke in this theater. There’s 2,400 people and she’s the very first talk of the day kicking it all off. And she says, “I’m going to start this talk when I feel an earthquake,” and then she just stops and stands there in dead silence, and just the tension is multiplying by the second. And we got to about 40 seconds and people are vocally shouting out the words “Earthquake!” They haven’t a clue what’s going on.

And then, finally, she stops and goes, “Right. I felt one.” And up on the live feed pops a magnitude earthquake in Guatemala or somewhere, and she is actually a human cyborg, and she’s had these sensors fitted in her body that allowed her to feel any seismic plate shift anywhere in the world, and it’s one of the craziest things you’ve ever heard, but that wasn’t really said in the introduction. The audience didn’t know this so they just thought she was nuts for 30 to 40 seconds. But I’m sitting there and I’m like, “This is a perfect callback. This is something that I couldn’t have planned for,” so I’m super nervous, and I don’t have butterflies in my stomach. I have pigeons. Like, I’m sweating bullets, all the usual nerves that you’re getting ready when you’re going to do a talk. But rather than focus on that, I’m like just trying to remember what she said.

So, I went up, I’m standing on stage, and the same two thousand and three hundred, four hundred people are staring at me, and I was like, “Well, ladies and gentlemen, I’m a bit nervous to be honest. I’m put off because I don’t know how to start this talk. I had initially planned to just stand here and wait for an earthquake but that’s been done already.” And they just cracked up, and this applause just keeps building and building, and I was like, “And you’re obviously a great audience because when she said earthquake, I left the building. Like, you didn’t even budge from your seats. How much did you pay for these tickets?” And now, they know, I couldn’t have planned for this. This is obviously in the moment.

And, again, it’s a technique that you’ll see in a lot of great stories and a lot of great live performances, and even just great job interviews where whatever the other person says, you got to listen enough to give it back to them. And in the world of comedy and storytelling, it just shows that you’re not separate from the audience; you’re actually one of the audience.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful and a great example to bring that to life in terms of it’s clear that that was not pre-packaged, it’s in the moment, it calls back to something unique because, I guess, if you called back to something, I don’t know, not that noteworthy.

David Nihill
Well, you don’t want to reference something not funny.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, “I was going to red shirt but the last speaker was wearing a red shirt, huh.” It’s like, “Okay, none of us care about that. Like, we’re not at all moved by what you’re saying here.”

David Nihill
But then if you…Here’s an example of stuff that isn’t wildly exciting. I spoke at a Google conference recently, and it was a developer’s conference, and I sat in there watched the three speakers before me, and someone told the story about Indonesia, and they’re like, “Oh, my grandmother in Indonesia is kind of crazy.” And I was like, “All right. The audience laughed a bit at that. Noteworthy.” And then someone started talking about origami and linking their passion for origami to coding. I’m like, “All right. That’s a bit unusual. Noteworthy.” And then the biggest cheer of the morning, by far, was when someone gave a talk, and they said, “We need more Google credits.”

Now, I have not got a clue what Google credits are but these people were going wild for Google credits. So, like about doing my talk, and a comedian will do this all the time. They’ll get up in the first 30 seconds all pretty locked down unless they’re going to do the callback and go. So, what I did in the TEDx Talk was a bit risky because I haven’t established any relationship with the audience that I’m clearly going off script. So, the payoff is huge but the potential for failure is a little bit high unless you know a key thing. So, a smarter way to do that is prepare the first 30 seconds of your talk like a comedian would do or a great storyteller. Make sure you get off to a good start and then try the goofing around just a little bit so if it doesn’t pay off you can just go seamlessly back into what you’re talking about.

So, I get on stage at this Google event and I started my talk as I normally would, and I just stopped for a second, I’m like, “It’s an interesting day-to-day, I tell you. I’ve learned a lot. I didn’t know anything coding but now I know a lot about Indonesia and I’m scared of grandmothers over there, and origami and coding are linked. Who would’ve known? And, most of all, my biggest takeaway is what’s clear that everyone in this room should get immediately more Google credits.” And they go wild and it’s an applause break for someone they don’t know, who’s a stranger and an outsider, and definitely has impostor syndrome because what do I know about developers or coding. But they’re reacting to a technique.

Again, it’s the callback. It couldn’t be pre-planned but it is. It’s put into a structure that just allows you to move along seamlessly. And it’s nearly, like, a magician pulling back a magic trick, someone showing you, “Oh, actually, I’m using this structure where I just need to pick different elements every time.” But those elements are quite important. The biggest reaction has to be last. It’s the same as the rule of three. So, normal thing, normal thing, biggest thing. And you want to build recency into that as well. So, you want most recent mention, second most recent mention, third most recent mention, because then they know what you’re doing. Whereas, if you do it the other way around, they don’t catch on as quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, there’s so much good stuff here. So, again, to have rocking, engaging stories, we want to have the good or funny bit to be last; patterns and threes are great, are as callbacks; it’s absolutely critical that it is relatable, like, “I see myself in your story, in your shoes”; and it’s succinct in that we’re getting just the most relevantly excellent bits and stripping away excess words and sentences and details that don’t need to be there; and some details like colors and names. Tell me, any other critical ingredients for a great storytelling?

David Nihill
Yeah, you’ve hit them all. I just think you have to love the story you’re telling is the probably the most critical one. Like, you actually have to dig it yourself and you actually have to get a bit excited when you’re telling it, and it has to be just from the heart. And the more personal it is, the better, the more unique to you. And you may be like, “Oh, that story is inappropriate.” It’s not if you make it appropriate. You can tell a story that is not as you.

I remember doing it. It’s the transition line that’s the key thing. So, once you plan the story and you’re building it into some form of talk or some part of learning point, once you write the story, go back and then write a transition line that makes it pretty fine and pretty obvious and unquestionable why you’re sharing that particular story.

So, I was speaking at a conference recently in Portugal called Web Summit, it’s the world’s largest tech conference, and they had me hosting a session on innovation which I know nothing about whatsoever, unless I find a new way of washing my underpants. That’s about as innovative I get most of the time. So, normally, I don’t really know how to start it off because they have 100 of the world’s most innovative large-scale companies in there sitting around, and I just start off telling about my mother.

And I was like, “Geez, you know, my mother came over to San Francisco to visit me recently. And she’s a bit older, grew up pretty Catholic and conservative, and we’re just sitting there on the couch. And out of nowhere, she’s like, ‘David, do you have any of those cannabis cookies?’ And I was like, “Cannabis cookies?” As it happens, I actually have a whole fridge full of them, thanks to San Francisco for legal medical reasons, obviously, so I fed her a few of them. And it was life-changing. We were making roast potatoes, which is basically caviar for Irish people at the time, and she was over-staring at the oven like a puppy just waiting for these things to be done. We nearly had to drag her away from it. The odor was kicking her up because it’s her first time in life having the munchies and she was basically snorting potatoes as they were coming out.

To only change her life, she went off walking to the Golden Gate Bridge the next morning, like this lady hadn’t been walking in years, came back with a pair of Lululemon pants on her, I couldn’t believe it. She’s like, “All the girls are wearing them,” and corrupted my auntie when I went home, just like weed smell coming down from the house in Ireland, I was like, “Geez, what is going on here?” And the thing is you think, “Oh, that story is not relevant to anything.” It got more bonkers, long story short. Like, one day she’s like, “David, what do you think of that gay marriage in Ireland,” because Ireland was the first country in the world, by popular vote, to legalize gay marriage, which is quite a turnaround for a place that’s seen as backwards in the eyes of a lot of people to be very forward that quick.

Before I could answer, me Ma says, “David, nothing new to me. I was the first lesbian in Ireland to get married back in 1970.” And I was just sitting there dumbfounded, I was like, “Does Dad know about this? Like, what’s going on here?” And she’s like, “Well, when your dad and I were going to get married, he got a bit drunk the night before, lost his birth certificate, we couldn’t find it. But, luckily, he had a dead sister, Patricia, she died when she was two.” And I was like, “Dad had a dead sister Patricia? You never mentioned this to me before.” She’s like, “Well, it’s not central to the story. Don’t worry about it.” I was like, “This sounds pretty central to me, mom.” And she goes on, she’s like, “Well, the priest didn’t have the best eyesight, your dad’s called Patrick, his dead sister is called Patricia, so we just went ahead and used her birth certificate, so technically I’m married to your dad’s dead sister.” Delighted with herself.

And I’m at this tech conference and I was telling them something similar, I can’t remember how much detail I went into the weed, but I was like, “We’re all in here in this room focused on innovation, but how well do you know your own family members? You assume that your customers, you know them, that you know what they want, that they desire, but I didn’t know my mom was into munching weed cookies and was experimenting with lesbian marriage on the side. Sometimes we assume we know things, and we shouldn’t. There’s nothing that research can’t solve that we could get to know our customers better and drive further innovation.”

And then whatever waffly section you put in there off the top of your head, it will come out better than what I just said off the top of mine. So, off the top of your head, then script it and write it, and say, “How do I get from this story to illustrate a point that I want to make?” So, the core point there was like, “You don’t know your end users as well as you think you do, and I’m going to substitute my parents for them in that story.” So, a big skill in the world of storytelling, I think, that’s overlooked a lot of the time is, “What is the transition line? Or what is the excuse you need to give yourself to make that story make perfect sense for your audience?”

Pete Mockaitis
And so, in the sequencing, the transition happens after the story and not before the story?

David Nihill
Yeah, usually, unless you say you kick off…a lot of TED Talks will start in this way as well or you’ll notice a lot of good effective talks will start with one very generic statement and then they’re into the story. And the statement is generic for a reason because they don’t want to get people to argue with them off the bat, so they’re not like a lawyer. When you’re doing storytelling or you’re doing any form of live performance, you’re trying to win over the audience. So, if you have an argument, you’re not going to make it at the top. You’re going to hide it.

So, say I got up there and I say, “Oakland is a crazy place,” and I’m in San Francisco, pretty close to Oakland, someone will cross their arms, dead stare me, and go, “I don’t agree with you. I live here. I love the place. I don’t agree with that statement.” But if I say, “Oakland can be an interesting place sometimes,” pretty much that statement would agree to everybody, agreeable to much more people, and it allows me to tell my story. And so, I haven’t made my point of view clearly on it so it’s a bit more intriguing, “Oh, what does this guy think about it? What’s he going to say?” Whereas opposed to, “I hate this. Let me tell you why,” which you don’t want to make.

So, it’s nearly the anti-lawyer’s approach to public speaking where a lawyer will make their argument really quickly because that’s their job, they’re on the clock to do it. As a public speaker, you really have to walk people into it, win over the room to get them on your side, and then you’re closing argument kind of sneaks up on them. So, your full license to tell the story.

There’s a TED Talk by Shawn Achor about happiness that’s one of the best you’ll ever see. I think it’s the eighth or the ninth most watched in the world. But if you watch it, it’s 11 to 12.5 minutes long, and the first 4.5 minutes is a story about him playing with toy soldiers.

Pete Mockaitis
With his sister.

David Nihill
Yeah, with his sister and breaking her arm. And it has nothing to do with anything, and you’ll see the same thing in Ken Robinson’s TED Talk. It’s “Do schools kill creativity?” It’s the most viewed and popular TED Talk of all time, and he tells a million stories, well, not a million, a slight over-exaggeration but there’s at least four to five stories in there that have absolutely nothing to do with that topic, but they’re beautiful stories that you can tell he loves telling, and they loosely are connected to the topic.

So, if you’re giving a talk about technology, your parents’ struggle with sending you emojis in an inappropriate basis, or whatever you’re getting eggplants from your mother in the middle of the night, who literally thinks they’re just eggplants and nothing else, well, that’s mildly entertaining to an audience, and you can use that to support a transition line that might be the struggles of a certain demographic to adapt to different features of user design.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, this is really rich stuff. I guess I’m thinking about there’s very different modes of communicating. Like you mentioned a lawyer, I’m thinking about consultants. We always talk about answer first, or the executive summary, I’m like, “All right. David, you need to sell this division for four key reasons. It’s unprofitable, it’s shrinking, and whatever.” And so, then it’s sort of right from the get-go. And so now our, like I speak for the consulting industry, the consultants’ perspective on the matter is that that is an efficient use of time for busy executives who don’t want to guess as to what your slide means. They want you to lay out the argument.

And so, I guess that’s how I’m thinking about the tradeoff there is it’s less fun than what you’re talking about, it’s less engaging unless you have a really strong vested in that position on either side, but it may be faster. How do you think about this, like, the different approaches?

David Nihill
I think that’s fundamentally the reason why many of us live and are subjected to so many boring meetings because we feel…we take the emotion out of people and we assume that they want the highest value in the shortest amount of time illustrated with numbers and graphs. Whereas, realistically, our human brain is crying out for the story behind the numbers. So, you can show me a chart and a line, they’re like, “Oh, look at the way the line goes up and then it goes down again, and then it goes up. Bet you didn’t see that coming.” “Woohoo, amazing. Please share your slide deck with me.”

By way of interest, next time you give a presentation, give a link in the end and say, “Here’s a link.” Make it a bit.ly link so it’s trackable and give it to people because they always ask for the slides. They love asking for slides, “Oh, I’d love to get the slides from that presentation,” and just see how many people actually click on that because. Like it is miniscule. I do it at big conferences where there’s like 2,000 people, people don’t care. They like the story, they like relating to you as a human. They’re more likely to buy from you if they learn something about you.

And if you have that kind of…it’s very hard to like someone that just leads with the numbers and just says, “Here’s the four things you need to do to turn this business around today.” Where if you could illustrate one of those things for me, I’m much less likely to give you resistance in following your advice in it if the story is so clear as to why I should do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Well, tell us, we got a lot of good stuff, you’ve got something I can’t resist. You’ve got a secret for finding the funny: preparation, anticipation, punchline. We touched on some of this. Can you expand on this approach?

David Nihill
Yeah. I don’t know if that…it’s definitely not a secret because you’ll see it all over the time. But, yeah, it’s just, “What is that little bit of buildup that you need there to flip it?” I think it’s most easily repeatable in the world of visual presentations. So, if you have like a whole bunch of data and words on a slide or some form of presentation in your job, just take it off and put the key word or metric, or break it down to five words. And if you want to have a bit of fun, and you want to get funny in there, just don’t take a picture that’s funny and throw it up there and point at it like a lunatic, and be like, “Look at that dog. I found it on the internet. It’s nice, isn’t it?” And they’re like, “Yeah, okay. You’re a weirdo.” But if you build some anticipation to the image and use the misdirect, like the one, two, four, basically, you’re setting up the sequence where you’re not going to give them what they expect.

Pete Mockaitis
“I’d like to share with you our new mascot, the marketing team has been hard at work for months finding just the perfect brand…” and then the ridiculous dog goes, like, “Ha, ha, ha.”

David Nihill
Exactly. Or a three-legged hippo or anything, and then they always react. I had a friend, she was speaking at a conference in Australia, and she was the head of growth for Airbnb at one stage when they were in pure hybrid inflation mode. And she’s like, “Here’s a picture of me. And what I love is that I look so calm and calculated at this, my desk is organized. But the inside, I actually feel like this,” and that’s the moment that builds the anticipation because they’re like, “Well, what’s this look like?” and then the image becomes the flip. So, the timing on that is quite important to build up the expectation, then reveal the image, and then comment on the image.

So, she showed them a picture of a little girl getting sprayed in the face by an out-of-control fire hydrant for what she was then, and they cracked up laughing. But it’s not the viral hilarity by any means, but it just gives that anticipation, and it’s a very clear and simple misdirect. And I would say just bear that in mind when you’re presenting any form of information from wherever it may be to a job interview or anything. Just try and not do what they’re expecting you to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, maybe a final question before we hear about your favorite things. If folks, they think, “Okay, this is good stuff or good content and it’s funny but, hey, I think I may be just too nervous to deliver at this kind of high level. It seems intimidating to go. It’s like advanced ninja skills in presentation is what you’re asking. And I’m nervous already right now with my not-so-funny presentations,” how do you recommend folks overcome stage fright?

David Nihill
Yeah. Well, I think, number one, we get sold on the belief that we can overcome it, which I think is mostly false. I never overcame it but I got really good at managing it. And everybody else I’ve talked to over the years got really good at managing it. And I would add to that by saying when you were talking about advanced ninja skills, it’s a funny thing. And in the world of public speaking, they’ll try and sell you a beginner course, advanced, intermediate, whatever it might be. We’re not learning a language here. There’s no intermediate or advanced level. We’re just speaking. And the people who get paid 30 grand to talk, they make the same mistakes as someone who’s doing it for the first time. They just don’t know it because they have a bit of a false confidence that goes with the title they have.

But just recognize that the little things that make a big difference are not advanced, so outsourcing your introduction is super easy so that you don’t have to start off listing your own achievements and building your credibility, do that every time. Use an app like Perfect Timer, which is totally free, to track the timing of your presentation and go short before long. Never talk for an hour if you don’t have to. Like, the brain taps out.

The maximum human attention span, according to John Medina, who’s one of the world’s leading brain psychologists, is 9:59. Once you’re over that, you’re in a little bit of an uphill battle to keep people’s attention. So, realize that no one’s ever going to come up to you after a presentation, going, “That was amazing. I just have one problem. I wish it was longer.” Not even your family, your loved ones, that granny you haven’t seen in years, none of them want you to go for longer. So, go short before long. Let’s say never finish on a Q&A. Like, these are just simple things.

Like, when it gets to the end of your talk, say, “I’m going to take a few questions before I make my conclusion.” Ninety-nine percent of the world’s speakers don’t do that and they stand there like an absolute lemon while nobody asks them questions. They feel mildly embarrassed and that they don’t get an applause because nobody knows it’s over because you didn’t get asked that question anyway. And every speaker in history has been in that scenario, and they stand there, and the host is like, “Ooh, has someone got a question? You down the back?” And that person is like, “Hell, no. I don’t have one thing,” nearly going under the table. And you, as the speaker, go to walk off, “Okay, we’re finished here.” And then someone shouts a question, “Oh, actually, I have one,” so now you’re back on again. Now people are like, “Oh, God, how long am I going to be here?” so they start leaving.

So, it’s like this takes on like your favorite band. Like, U2 would never go around the world with their new album. Of course, I’m going to take an Irish example here and be stereotypical. But they’re never going to go Madison Square Garden and debut their new album, play 10 songs, get to the ninth song, and they only have one left, they planned it, it’s the best song, it’s the one that’s going to bring it home, but they’re like, “You know what, we were going to play that but how about, does anyone here in the audience sing? Anyone want to bring this home? Anyone want to bust out a ukulele?” That will be insanity, but every speaker does that, and they’re like, “Hey, audience, say something crazy to me.”

So, just using that sentence, “I’m going to take a few questions before I make my conclusion,” tells people that there’s more to come, their questions have to be short and sweet, and, of course, you’re going to save a slide with learning points on it to remind them what you’re actually talking about. And how many are there going to be? Three. And those things aren’t focusing on funny, they’re not focusing on humor, but they make you look way slicker, all of a sudden, as a speaker, and maybe you weren’t the most confident.

It’s like me with shaky hands. Like, my nickname in college was Shaking Stevens. When I gave a presentation, I shook so much that I turned into an Irish salsa dancer, like my whole body was going in places that I didn’t wanted it to be going. People would come from other classes just to see me falling apart in front of people. And it’s not a matter of, “How do I stop shaking?” I can’t because that’s adrenaline. I’m never going to convince myself to go.

So, to this day, that happens where you just identify, “Well, what are all the things that are going to go wrong? Someone is going to give me a glass of water and there’s no way I can drink a glass of water with a shaky hand. I’m going to have a bottle of water and my mouth is going to be dry. Well, geez, I’ll never be able to open a bottle of water. And if it’s a full bottle of water, I’m going to squirt it all over me. My hands are shaking so much.”

So, it’s a matter of little things like that, like no glass, get rid of that one, make sure the bottle of water is three quarters empty and already opened, and safe distance from you to knock it over. If you’re more comfortable, start with your hands in pockets. Don’t show people shaky hands. Use a technique called The Memory Palace that was popularized by Joshua Foer in his book, Moonwalking with Einstein, and he has a killer talk on that as well on TED, and it’s just a memorization technique that allows you to visualize key points so you’re never going to hold notes in your hands. So, now, if you shake, you don’t have to hold notes. You’ll look way more professional. And then if something happens, The Memory Palace, you will never ever go blank. And nearly everyone’s biggest fear when it comes to public speaking is going blank on stage but nearly nobody teaches it which is insane.

So, like, if I want to teach you the word in Spanish for “to fit,” the word is caber. It’s super hard to remember that tomorrow. But if I asked you to picture a New York City taxi cab, a yellow bubble one, and it’s pulling up downtown Manhattan in front of Trump Plaza, and a bear runs out of this taxi, or bumps out of Trump Plaza and tries to get into a taxi, and, of course, the hairy bear doesn’t fit, he’s huge, and his hairy legs are kicking out the windows as he tries to squeeze his body in the window, and his hairy bear bottom is in the air. And you’re visualizing that, and you’re visualizing that the cab, the bear does not fit in the cab, caber is the word for “to fit.”

So, you have this whole little trick of remembering information and making it visual. And, for the rest of your life, you’ll never forget the word for “to fit” in Spanish, and it’s because you’ve used something called The Memory Palace, which is visualizing, creating a crazy that only makes sense for you for everything you need to remember, and then The Memory Palace just means putting that, picturing it taking place somewhere that’s familiar to you.

So, instead of having a bullet point list for your talk, you picture your talk taking place in your house, and all you’re doing is walking around the lap of your house encountering crazy images that you’ve created, like a bear trying to get into a taxi cab. So, when you put that together, you become very spontaneous in public speaking because you’re never going to forget what you’re talking about. So, if someone falls off a chair, or farts, or burps, or screams, or interrupts you, you’ll react to it, and you don’t go into panic. If the fire alarm goes off, you don’t try and keep going, you just say, “God, the fire alarm has gone off.” Everything becomes an opportunity for some form of entertainment because at any moment you can get back on track.

So, I wouldn’t think of it as trying to be funny or off the bat. I wouldn’t put it as advanced level stuff. It’s just the techniques that can make you look advanced, that if you know 10 or 15 things that most people don’t, no matter how many years they’ve been doing speaking, you can normally look better than them really quickly. I have all people all the time writing me messages, and they’re like, “Dude, I give the exact same presentation as I did a year ago. I put in a couple of GIFs, some funny images, told one story and I got voted the best speaker. No idea. Night and day the last time.” And that’s the kind of stuff that happens all the time. So, it’s not as complex as people who are trying to sell you stuff make it out to be.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

David Nihill
You know, I think I heard him on your podcast, Jeffrey Gitomer, and he has a lovely quote called “The end of laughter is followed by the height of listening.” I just thought that sums up the world of public speaking, timing, and delivery in one sentence. Because the most attention you’ll ever have from anyone ever is the moment after you make them laugh because their just brain says, “Give me more of that.” So, the dopamine spike lends itself to grabbing attention from an audience.

So, if you have to say something serious, the best time to say something serious and memorable and impactful, or ask for money, for example, or whatever you’re doing in your pitches, to make people laugh a little bit before that. But, yeah, “The end of laughter is followed by the height of listening.” That one I love and, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all,” but that’s not really…Helen Keller gets attributed to it sometimes but I’m not sure who actually said it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how about a favorite study?

David Nihill
Favorite study. You know, Stanford did one once where they had people locked in a room staring at babies all day, and that was a good few years ago. I don’t think you could get away with that today, where all these researchers are like, “We’re just going to borrow your babies.” But the study was to show that babies, on average, laugh about 300 times per day, and grownups laugh about 15. So, for anyone who tells you, you don’t need a bit of laughter in your life, you definitely do, and you need more of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

David Nihill
Oh, a toss-up. I like The Man Who Tried to Save the World, the Fred Cuny mystery, and The Fish That Ate the Whale. And I like both of those because they’re just stories of these individuals that did things that you didn’t think was possible just because they thought they could do it. Like, the Fred Cuny mystery is a guy who decided to declare himself the world’s expert on humanitarian aid relief. So, if a tsunami hits tomorrow, he’d be the first person who got the call from all the world’s leading agencies. And he had no skills or qualifications to get himself that job, and he got to the point where George Soros was writing him cheques, and saying, “Go fix Chechnya. That’s your job.”

I don’t even think there’s an audiobook version of it. I learned it from a girl who’s a journalist, and she’s like, “This is the best book you’ll ever read that no one’s ever told you about.” So, yeah, it’s The Man Who Tried to Save the World, the Fred Cuny mystery. And The Fish That Ate the Whale is about the guy, Sam, the Banana Man, Zemurray, who basically all the CIA manuals for taking over a company, err, sorry, a country and putting out puppet president in place were based on what this guy did to take control of Honduras just so he could sell more bananas. They’re brilliant stories. You’re like, “Okay.” They’re kind of things like, “I can’t believe I never heard of these stories before.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. And how about a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

David Nihill
I like HubSpot a lot. I don’t know if it makes me awesome at my job but it definitely improves me a bit, even the free version of HubSpot. I think if you’re selling anything online, I think, just to be able to track emails and know that somebody actually opened your email, forwarded the links in your email, or just activated, or looked at it, or was interested in it, that makes a big difference. But I use Rev.com a lot for transcribing stuff. Probably the easiest way you can improve your public speaking is to watch yourself or listen to yourself back, but nobody ever wants to do that because it’s painful, and they will avoid it at all costs. But if you put it through something like Trint or Rev.com, it does the transcriptions there that turns your work into a script, and it’s really easy to see where you need to improve when you do that.

So, I use that a lot. That and Perfect Timer, which is basically just a countdown timer on your phone that you can’t miss. Because if you do public speaking in meetings and conferences, usually you’re so distracted you’ll lose track of time, or the event organizer tells you, “Oh, we’ll keep track of the time. We’ll have a clock on the stage,” and then everything breaks. So, it’s saved my life a lot. And that app is free. I think it’s called Perfect Timer.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

David Nihill
Favorite habit, kite surfing by miles. I nearly get killed on a weekly basis and I still love it so it must be good for something.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

David Nihill
You know, funny enough, Jeffrey Gitomer’s line is the one that I built into my talks over the years that I love the most, and it’s probably the most quoted. So, I wish it was something that I said but, honestly, I think that sums up the whole argument for using humor the most, that, “The end of laughter is followed by the height of listening.”

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

David Nihill
Towards DavidNihill.com. I think I have everything there. And in the world of public speaking, I put under a course name called Hacking Public Speaking. So, that was my bit of marketing experimentation. I was like, “I wonder if I offered 50% of their money back for a completion within 30 days. Would they actually do it?” You know, you take online courses. I signed up to Master Class and I’m not cooking like Jamie Oliver yet. I’m just blowing up microwaves for survival. I’ve blown up hotdogs in the microwave. So, everything I know I learned the hard way is there, or you can read a lot of it for free. And I think I have a talk on Google, an altar talk with a lot of the content are on public speaking if you just want to improve for free.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

David Nihill
Yeah, I would say to put more of your own personality out there in the world of business and you will get more clients from it. And don’t give them that little bit of amazing new miracle thing that you have in your presentation, and be like, “Oh, that number is going to resonate with them.” The personal story and the something that allows them to see themselves in your shoes and come up to you after a presentation, or just relate to you on a one-on-one level, that’s going to be a story, something for your own life that you normally wouldn’t share. And if you think you have nothing funny, the magical recipe for that one is, if it’s embarrassing for you, it’s funny for me.

Pete Mockaitis
David, this has been a treat. I wish you lots of luck in all of your fun adventures.

David Nihill
Thank you very much.

Pete Mockaitis
Davina, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Davina Stanley
My pleasure, Pete. Lovely to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom. But, first, I wanted to hear a bit, your career has had some interesting turns, and it started with potato farming in Australia. What’s the story here?

Davina Stanley
It did. I grew up on a potato farm, actually, in the country. And the beauty of that is that you have to constantly solve problems without having the resources that you need. And so, it was just a really great place to grow up, but a really big contrast to where I ended up. So, I ended up marrying someone who wanted to live overseas, and he wanted to be a banker, so we lived in Hong Kong, New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and then back to Australia again. So, we have been not quite everywhere but a lot of places, which is quite different to the sort of life that I started out with. It’s so fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, if you lived on a potato farm, does that mean you eat potatoes all the time, because I love potatoes?

Davina Stanley
Well, at the moment, I do too but I’m a bit conflicted because, at the moment, I don’t eat a lot of carb at all, so, I don’t know. I haven’t told my dad that though. I think he’d be thoroughly mortified. I think he’d be devastated.

Pete Mockaitis
Make sure he doesn’t listen.

Davina Stanley
We grew up on a diet of Sunday nights testing the load before it went to the potato chip factory, so dinner on a Sunday night, particularly during winter, was potato chips and donuts because you had the oil out, right? So, totally different than what I do now.

Pete Mockaitis
Potato chips and donuts.

Davina Stanley
Jam donuts.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, man, as a child it’s a dream come true.

Davina Stanley
We thought that. We thought that. We just had to look at the potatoes and there are the chips, or fries, as you probably call them, and make sure that there were no green or black bits. It’s just there was too much sugar in them. That was our job. Test them. You see, that was the whole point, it was not just cheap food or bribery for the children. It was actually, there was a method, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly.

Davina Stanley
Are they still good to send to the factory? Hmm.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s cool and that’s fun. And I remain a huge potato enthusiast as well as a communications enthusiast, which is your cup of tea nowadays, and really for more than 20 years here. So, you worked in McKinsey as a communications specialist. Can you tell us what does that mean and what are you doing now?

Davina Stanley
So, as a communications specialist, my job was to be all across a technique called structured thinking that we used, particularly, in our role in a communication setting. So, we use a very structured approach to either help consultants come up with the stories that they needed to tell their clients, perhaps it was an update, perhaps it was the strategy at the end of a piece of communication, or also when working directly with clients, we would sometimes go in and be embedded in a team and work with a client to develop a communications strategy. So, we would be using those techniques to help consultants engage and really communicate complex information to any kind of audience that they needed to communicate to. So, we were internal consultants to the consultants really.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Consulting consultants on how to consult.

Davina Stanley
Yeah, a little bit. Exactly. And, look, it was really fun, it was really challenging. And so, I worked there for a few years in the Hong Kong office, and then my husband and I moved to New York, and I was offered a full-time position there but it was full time or no time, and I arrived six months pregnant with the one-year old on my hip, so I decided maybe that was a good time to take a break.

So, I took a bit of a break and we renovated the house and so on. And  then when we moved further on in our adventure, I just freelanced for the firm for a long time and I was helping run training sessions, I worked for the marketing practice, I did a whole lot of things, anything where I could help the teams or the firm in terms of communication.

So, I kept doing that and it just sort of gradually built it as my family has grown older and I’ve had more freedom. I’ve built it into something larger.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is fascinating. And I want to hear, when it comes to, you know, McKinsey consultants are amongst the smartest professionals in their way, or our way. I’m former Bainy, so we share some of the brand parts.

Davina Stanley
We do. We share a bit of a passion here, around the structure, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
But I’d love to hear from you. So, given that, so even super smart folks, what communications mistakes did you see that they made repeatedly, like you could just bank on, “Okay, we’re going to have fix A, B, and C”?

Davina Stanley
All right, so there’s a few things. I think, firstly, it’s spending a lot of time on the analysis, and you should spend a lot of time on the analysis, but leaving that a bit too long and allowing too little time to prepare the communication so that there’s the risk that all these great ideas you’ve got don’t translate to the audience. So, finding a way to perhaps marry the analysis together with the communication planning, or just allow a bit more time to really think through the messaging and synthesize. So, I think anyone who’s really close to some things, smart people or not, struggle to get just a bit of separation from it so that they can perhaps get up in the helicopter and see what really matters here. So, I think that’s one thing.

And I think, again, in this, I see it at McKinsey and other places too, where people are bidding clients to overemphasize the analyses and underemphasize the communication. So, similar thing but it’s just about, “Oh, what do I think really matters?” Actually, forgetting that communication matters quite a bit. So, that’s one thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then, you’ve sort of captured many of your ideas in your book The So What Strategy. What does that mean, the so what strategy?

Davina Stanley
So, I think we heard so many of our clients, people that we work with, saying things like, “You know, I presented to the leadership team, and I had prepared so hard, and I’d rehearsed, and I was so organized. I’d really invested in it and I went and I presented. Then, at the very end, the CEO or the leader, turned around and said, ‘Well, so are we in good shape or what’s the main thing here?’ and they just got lost in all of the detail.” And I think there’s something there that we saw happening time and time again, and people just didn’t really know how to go about distilling the messages.

And yet, when Gerard, my business partner and I would work on something together, we’d be listening to someone telling us their story. And we were talking with each other, and we realized, “Well, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it, it’s that one or it’s that one? It’s this pattern. It looks like that or it looks like that.” It’s pretty quick for us to come up with a skeleton.

And so, we thought, “Well, perhaps a way we can really help people is simplify the structured communication discipline, the rules, like put it into a process that we naturally use,” because we’ve just done it for so long.

And when we sat down and worked through them all, we thought, well, it looks to us like there’s about seven patterns that we see being used most commonly in the business communication that we work in. And when I say business, I mean professional. It could be consulting, it could be business, it could be government.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. So, well, then we got seven different common storyline patterns, and then you said there’s also a process. So, maybe can we hear the process first and then learn a bit about what are those patterns?

Davina Stanley
Sure. So, we talk about a three-phase process. First of all, design your strategy, secondly, develop your storyline, and then, thirdly, deliver your communication. So, most people jump straight to the deliver piece, “How can I write that PowerPoint? How can I build those charts? How can I write the paper?” So, we’re saying, “Hang on. Let’s become more conscious and structured in those steps that come before that.”

And so, design your strategy is all about being really clear about your purpose for this particular piece of communication, getting really dialed in as to what specifically you want from a particular piece of communication, and then understand your audience. Well, that’s, “Let’s go appropriately deep.” If it’s an email, you’re not going to go as deep as you are if it is, let’s say, a mergers pitch or something, so it’s scalable. But you’re going to go quite deep in understanding who your audience is, and what their hot buttons are, and really getting to understanding them very well.

So, you bring those together and then think also about your process. Who do you need to involve in the process of engaging other stakeholders in your journey? So, you’ve got that sort of set before you start. And then, once you’re fairly clear on that, you may iterate back, but fairly clear on that. Then it’s time to start mapping out your storyline. And we’ve built on other parts that I think you’d be familiar with, The Pyramid Principle, which was developed at McKinsey by a woman called Barbara Minto. And we’ve taken what she’s got there, and said, “Okay, how do we make this really practical and easy for people to use?” And we’ve altered the language a bit to really help people work out what the elements are for an introduction.

And, interestingly, the strategy and then the introduction, which might only be a couple of lines in your whole communication, can take quite a big proportion of the amount of time it takes to prepare the whole thing. But you’re sort of leading to that single question you want your audience to ask, and then working out what that answer is, and you’re stating that in a sentence.

So, when I was talking about people getting stuck in the detail, they very rarely have that single message that they need to convey, and they even, less regularly, have that next layer below it, which we described as being a grouping of ideas either as a least or structured to that logic. So, there’s some rules and some principles, and we’ve built a 10-point test to help people evaluate whether their ideas fit in the right place. We’re just very strong believers that if the thinking is clear, if the synthesis is strong, then you’ll engage even if you’re not very confident, or your chance aren’t beautiful, or your prose isn’t perfect. If your thinking is really clear, and you can synthesize your message, it’s really powerful.

So, we encourage people to map that out on a single page, and in a particularly structured way, use that to test with stakeholders what their thinking is at the high level before you build anything, which changes the dynamic in the workflow and the stakeholder engagement quite substantially, and reduces the rework, because, by the time you go to prepare your communication in that last stage of delivering your communication, so much of the work is done. It’s actually really fast to prepare whatever it is that you need to prepare.

So, it’s about being really intentional about those three steps. We draw them in a triangle because we think they’re iterative, and it’s a storyline that’s a shape like a triangle, to help people have a process to use themselves, but also when they’re collaborating. It’s much easier to collaborate.

Pete Mockaitis
Right, yeah. So, while you’re on your one page, at the top we have the question we want them to be asking and the answer to that question.

Davina Stanley
We have even a tiny bit before that, we have the introduction which we call the context and the trigger, and that leads to that single question, and then the main message, and then the supporting argument underneath, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, do you have a particular recommendation in terms of just how many supporting arguments do you want? Is too few too many? What do you say?

Davina Stanley
Absolutely. Two to five, so never just one, otherwise you’ve got just one point, so one dot point. Never do that. Don’t do that. But no more than five if you can possibly help it. And if you are using a deductive structure, then it shouldn’t be more than three.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, deductive, can you define that for listeners?

Davina Stanley
So, it’s a way of building a case. So, it allows you to put forward your reasoning in classic logic language with a major premise followed by a minor premise, something that comments on the original point. But together, those two points, the first two, lead you to the third one, which will be, “Therefore, we should do something. And here’s the set of things we should do.” So, you’re always building a case towards a set of actions. And so, that’s enormously powerful when you’ve got to persuade people that a set of actions is the right set of actions to take. Like a business case or we need to change their mind about something and get them to act in the same engagement.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so could you maybe give us an example where we sort of affix these terms, these concepts, these labels, to some actionable verbiage or argument, bullet points, so we could sort of see how it all goes together?

Davina Stanley
Yeah, absolutely. So, perhaps if we talk about option stories because people, professionals, are often needing to put forward a set of options in terms of the way something might be handled. So, let’s say there’s a new computer system needs to be installed, and there might be a few different ways in which that could be done, and somebody has a view in mind that a particular path, maybe using a particular external vendor is the way to go, but, at the same time, they know that the leadership wants to see evidence that they’ve really considered a range of different ways of doing this, and they want to see their reasoning before they actually go and agree that this external vendor is the right way to go.

So, we’d be using what we call a “to be or not to be” pattern most likely, which is a deductive one. We’ve tried to give the patterns names so they’re memorable rather than just being deductive options, deductive or something. So, to be or not to be, so your main thought there would be that the big idea that overarches all of it would be, “Let’s hire a vendor X to install this system over the next six months,” or something like that.

And then the first point, the first of those three points that sits underneath, might be something like, “Look, we’ve looked at a whole lot of different ways that we might implement this software system,” and then you’d be going in and saying, “Well, we decided to investigate vendor X because they know our business really well, and they’re trusted by us. We decided to explore doing it ourselves because we thought it made sense to see whether we could do it internally, and we decided to explore another vendor because they’ve also got a good relationship with the bank,” let’s say their organization. So, you might explain why each one of those three is something worth considering.

And then in the next limb of the story, in that minor premise piece, you say, “However, we think vendor X is the best way to go.” And then underneath that, you’d be running through your criteria as to why you think that is the best way to go, and saying why they’re good and why the others ones are not going to be so fit for purpose. And so, by the end of that one, you’d want your audience to be in a place going, “Okay, that makes terrific sense. I’ve been able to discuss with you the pros and cons of this. I understand your thinking. I agree with you. So, okay, we should get vendor X. How do we do that?” And then they’d be ready to hear from you the set of steps that are there.

In fact, this is something that business leaders often talk to us about, about the lack of reasoning that people put forward. They very often go straight to, and you asked earlier about some of the challenges that I see consultants and others experiencing. And one of those would be the lack of why and not building the case, just saying, “Hey, we should have vendor X, and here’s how we should do it.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Well, is that just your opinion and you just like the guy over there, vendor X, and you think he’s funny. What are you working with there?”

Davina Stanley
Yeah, “Is he your brother-in law?” I mean, why? Why do it? And I think part of that comes from all of us when we’re working on something, we’ve got to a certain point in our thinking and our work. So, somebody’s gone through the process, they’ve analyzed their options, they’ve thought about it carefully, they’ve made a decision that they believe is the right thing, and so in their mind they’re ready to say, “Look, let’s just go. We’re ready. I’m impatient. I want get this thing done,” and they just forget that the audience is in a different place, and that’s why in our process, we really encourage people to drill into their purpose and their audience because it could be that when communicating something like that, actually you’ve got to come to the leadership group a couple of times.

If it’s a really big spend, you’ve got to take them on a journey, and so you’ve got to be really aware of where the audience is on that. Do they just need to agree with you that these are the right things to explore? Because, actually, in your situation, analyzing all the options is a big piece of work. And if you do that, that means you’re not doing something else. So, maybe because of the amount of time that’s required, they want you to actually come to them and say, “Look, we think this project is worth investigating or these options are worth considering. Do you agree they’re the right options? Great. You agree they’re the right options. We’ll go away, we’ll do our analyses, and spend a month doing the analyses, or whatever is involved.”

So, design your strategy piece is really important in that regard.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And it’s interesting, as you convey that sort of what we want them to take away, it’s like, “Wow, you really thought this through. You’ve done your homework, you’ve done the research, the investigation, the analyses.” And it’s funny, as I’m imagining you telling the story with slides, it’s like I would love to see, I don’t know, like a funnel or something which is like, “Hey, you know what, we looked at 34 potential vendors.” It’s like, “Oh, dang, that’s a lot of vendors.” “And we subjected them to these five key criteria. And, really, only two are worth looking at any further.” It’s like, “All right. I’m convinced. You’ve done some legwork and now I’m intrigued. Tell me about these two vendors that are pushing all the right buttons.”

Davina Stanley
Exactly. Exactly. So, you would use a very different structure for your story when you’re going to that initial conversation about, “Hey, let’s explore these options,” versus, “Let’s implement the recommendation.” So, that’s where the patterns come into play too. And we’ve put them on a handy little card, actually, where we’ve got the seven, and it’s on the centerfold in the book so that you can see them all on the one page.

And what we find people doing is just knowing they’ve got to do a piece of communication that matters enough to really think hard about it, and then open it up and just look at the different options. Just looking at the patterns, I think, helps them say, “Well, it could be that or it could be that,” and it gives them a place to start, and it also helps frame their thinking. So, it’s like that situation I relayed where we came out with the name “So What.” So, what does this mean? You don’t want to be in a position where you are being picked apart by your audience. So, when you’re presenting something that matters to someone more senior, the last thing I think you want is to have your proposition pulled apart and to be asked to go away because your thinking isn’t strong enough.

So, the patterns provide you with a little bit of a framework too to help you think, “Well, actually, have I thought this through enough? Have I articulated this well enough?” If you work through the ten points in there, it’s a really good set of thinking tests to say, “Are my ideas meeting that?” Maybe you’re familiar with. X consultants are really familiar with this idea of are there any overlaps or any gaps, and is a complete set of ideas? Have I organized them well?” And if you apply that test really thoroughly, then all sorts of things pop out, it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, how did I miss that? I’ve got actions and reasons in the one list. Bad thing. They’re different. How do I fix that? What do I move? Do I change my message? Do I move things around?”

And you can imagine like sticky notes on a wall or something. And I see my clients do this where you put all your messages down, and you sort them all around, and move them about until they’re in the right spot. So, the patterns give you a bit of a framework for testing your thinking so you don’t get caught up.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so you mentioned 10 tests for thinking to say, “Have I done thoroughly enough?” So, could you share a couple more with us that tend to frequently yield insight?

Davina Stanley
We talked earlier about having a single question that overarches the whole story, it leads, it draws your audience in. So, if we’re to drill into that one particular thing, you’d want that question, which often doesn’t appear in the communication, it appears in your preparation, to be the audience’s question, not yours, which makes a very big difference to the story that comes underneath. You want it to be one single question. So, what does that mean? Well, if you’ve got the word “and” in it, that’s a red flag. Is it really a single idea?

So, being very precise about, “Is it the audience’s question? Is it the single question we want them to ask us? Is it a single question? Is it really just one or is it a long set of words, with a question mark at the end, that’s really an amalgamation of a whole lot of different things? Is it really just one? And have we distilled the highest-level question that we can then answer in a single sentence that will frame the whole story, not just part of it, but all of it?

So, getting quite disciplined about that, it pushes the thinking. And, I don’t know about you, but when I started working in this environment, I came from a creative environment, I was a kindergarten art teacher, of all things. I suspect I’m the only kindergarten teacher ever to be hired by McKinsey, but I stand to be corrected. I’d like to meet if there was someone else who’s also had that path. So, I learned about communicating in a fairly creative way. So, I learned from an Australian children’s author, a woman called Mem Fox, who has written the most stunning children’s books. I don’t know if you have children or not, but if you do, hunt down Possum Magic” and Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge. They’re two really beautiful children’s books, and she’s a beautiful writer. And she taught a really creative way of finding the hook and building a story, which is part of what inspired me to transition from teaching into communication.

And that sort of message of finding the hook is absolutely relevant, but using structure and discipline is quite a different thing. And, certainly, when I started using it, I found it quite confining, like there are all these rules, and, oh, gosh, to have to obey all of them, that seems a little bit hard, and just feels like I’ve been put in some sort of box. But what I’ve learned is, by way of that example around the question, is that there’s such enormous value in constraints and how they push you to think and push you to be creative.

So, the creative part of me really rebelled against the structure for quite some time. But once I’ve came to see how liberating it was to actually have a framework to use and how much it pushed me to think and come up with clever solutions, I thought it started to be fun actually.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. Well, so let’s have some fun talking about some of these other storyline patterns. So, we talked about “To be or not to be.” Could you give us maybe the one-minute or less version of how would you define each of these storyline patterns?

Davina Stanley
How would I define them?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, like “Action Jackson,” what’s that?

Davina Stanley
Yeah, “Action Jackson,” that’s an action plan. So, it’s where you have an overall idea and then a set of steps that you’re going to take. So, when you’re going to have your standup in the morning with your team, and you’re saying, “Hey, team, this is what we’re going to do today.” When it’s not controversial, “Action Jackson” is the one to use. So, a list of two to five actions that need to be done that are tied together with one overall message.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And “Close the gap.”

Davina Stanley
Close the gap? That’s a fantastic one when you need to help people think differently about something. So, it’s a deductive structure, so it’s got a similar overall archetype to the “to be or not to be” that we talked about before, and that’s for going to a situation where you need to educate your audience about how something works perhaps in the new world, perhaps some regulations have changed, or the environment has changed, there’s something they don’t know that you need them to understand before they can accept your recommendation. So, maybe, “Success requires us to meet these criteria. However, we only meet some of them, so we’ve got to close the gap, we’ve got to meet the rest.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Davina Stanley
How’s that sound?

Pete Mockaitis
I like it. And the “Houston, we have a problem”? How’s that one go?

Davina Stanley
Oh, this one is Gerard’s favorite, and he particularly loved working with a whole lot of bankers in Houston last year. They really loved that it was named after them, this is, “Houston, we have a problem.” And let me first begin with we’re not to use Houston. When you’re communicating with someone who created the problem, find another way to tell the story, just saying.

So, this one is fantastic when you need to educate your audience about the nature of the problem that exists. And so, “Hey, people, here, this is a real problem,” and convince them that it’s a problem, “However, we’ve found the cause,” and then you can talk through what caused the problem, “Therefore, let’s fix the cause.” So, it’s a really proactive story.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And “the pitch.”

Davina Stanley
The pitch. This one is fantastic for proposal and business cases too, where you’re putting forward a pitch to say, “Hey, here’s a great idea that you should implement. You should hire us if you’re a consultant,” or, “You should implement this new system,” or, “Do this this way.” And then what you’re doing underneath that is coming up with a list of reasons why that’s a really great thing to do.

And so, in the book we talk about four reasons, which I’ll quickly run through because I think they’re useful for people. Firstly, we understand the problem. Secondly, we’ve got a solution. Thirdly, we can deliver a solution, a resolve, talking about if you’re the right people. And then you can manage the risks because it’s always important to cover up on that. So, that’s a brilliant one for a classic consulting pitch but also for recommending something that ought to be done.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how about the “traffic light”?

Davina Stanley
Traffic light is brilliant for updates. So, I think that’s a really common one and it’s really tempting for people to say, “Hey, we’ve been really busy. Here’s a long list of stuff we’ve done.” And leaders that I talked to really dislike that. So, using traffic light gives you a way of pretty simply grouping and sorting the ideas so that you can come up with an overall message. And, for example, if it’s good news, “Overall, we’re on track.” “Great. Why is that?” “Well, we’ve done all these things, we’ve started this, and we’ve got a plan for these.”

When someone goes into putting forward an update, let’s say, and they’re talking to their boss, their bosses will say to me, “Look, I love hearing what’s going on in my teams. I know they want lots of air time because they really want me to know exactly what’s going on in their world, but there are times when I just haven’t got time for that. If they can come in with that single message, everything is really good. They’ll just say ‘Thank you so much. Love your work. See you later.’”

By organizing ideas into a structure like that, you have the freedom so that when your audience doesn’t have time to hear the whole story, you can still get that big idea across. Whereas if you haven’t distilled the messages, you know the classic thing where you’re given half an hour or an hour to present, and you’re part of one of those revolving door days, maybe a steering committee sort of day, or a board day, or something like that, and person one comes in and person two and person three, and all these different people come in and present to a group.

And so, during the day, the time gets lost. And so, you perhaps thought you had 45 minutes, suddenly you’ve got 5 minutes. So, by having everything mapped out in a structure with a hierarchy like that, you can still get away with presenting because you’ve got the ideas. You don’t need to take them through all of the details before you get to the big point. And update for the classic for that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, and how about “watch out story”?

Davina Stanley
Watch out story, this one is fantastic when there is trouble ahead. So, you can imagine a ship sailing wrong, but at the same time is your opportunity to give the good news first, which is always nice. If you can genuinely give good news first, you want to do that, so, “We’ve been going well, however, there’s some risks ahead, therefore we should meet those risks. We should change course or whatever we need to do to address those.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that’s helpful as I’m sort of thinking about each of these. And I’d love to get your view on, could you maybe share an exciting case study or a story of someone who put all these together and saw cool results that they weren’t seeing when they weren’t doing this?

Davina Stanley
Sure. Sure. So, I was working with an infrastructure company toward the end of last year, and I’d worked with them for about a year, so I’d been over and ran a program and then come back a year later. And that’s a really nice thing to do in my world because we don’t always get to see the outcomes. Sometimes people will tell us or they’ll just say, “That was great,” but they won’t necessarily give us the concrete results.

So, in this case, I was working with a group of people for the second time just to give them a refresher. And a woman called Rebecca came in and we said, “How’s it all been going?” And she said, “Well, by changing, preparing the board papers that we need to prepare, and we do them every month for our area,” and they’re about leasing and finding opportunities, retail opportunities in an airport.

And so, she’d been preparing papers, which might say, “We should do a deal with this sort of retailer so that they should have shops in our airport or that sort of thing.” And the team had been spending a lot of time preparing their reports, but making that single change, which was to prepare a story using the one-pager, get the one-pager right, check it, test it first, and then prepare the paper later. By doing that, she said to me, they cut the amount of time taken to prepare those papers by 60%.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Davina Stanley
That’s 6-0. So, that was pretty exciting. Now, during that 12 months, she’d used a number of different stories, but “the pitch” I think was her favorite because she was often putting up a story that would say something that was pretty straightforward, that was something like, “We should get this book retailer into our buildings.” “Well, why is that?” “Well, they understand our business, they’ve got a great fit for the people who travel through our spaces. We can do what they deliver and we can manage the risks involved with bringing them in.” So, that was a really helpful one for her.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so that is really cool and I love the savings on the time on doing anything, so that is cool.

Davina Stanley
Which stops you doing the boring stuff, the frustrating stuff. I think that thing that I like because it makes you feel so much better about your job.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think maybe one of my last questions here is when we talk about sort of the supporting reasons and evidence, I think often I see a big difference between how smart I judge someone to be, fair or unfair, I don’t know. If they give me excellent evidence versus not excellent evidence.

So, for example, I was looking at like an insurance policy, and I said, “Wait a second. In this language, it kind of makes it sound like you can weasel out of anything because anything could be an alleged breach of an implied contract. Like, isn’t that anything in the world?” And then they say, “Well,” and their response was, “Oh, no one has ever raised that before.” It’s like, “Well, that’s not convincing evidence that you pay out claims, you’re not going to leave me high and dry.”

Or, they’ll say, “Well, hey, we have a great financial rating.” It’s like, “Well, that’s just about your assets versus your liabilities. It doesn’t have anything to do with customer satisfaction or your actual record.” And so, I was like trying to help them out, “I’m trying to give you money. I want this insurance. Like, can you show me this or this or this?” And I had to find for myself like how they’re rated by the National or North American Insurance something organizations. It’s like, “Okay, so you actually have fewer complaints than others so that’s not bad.”

Anyway, I don’t know, so that’s my rant. It’s like I ask a question, and instead of getting excellent evidence, I get sort of a wimpy evidence. So, what is the difference? How can we give awesome supporting reasons?

Davina Stanley
Yeah, I think the key is to keep asking a question. So, if you have a list of reasons, so let’s take your example about insurance.
How do you do that? So, firstly, look at an idea that you’re putting up, “We provide storm insurance.” “Okay. Well, how do you provide storm insurance?” Ask yourself a question that that naturally poses, and then answer it. And then if you build it out like a tree, it’s easy to see what sits where underneath, “So, we provide storm insurance,” very relevant in Australia at the moment. “Well, how do you do that?” “We offer this kind and that kind and that kind.” “Well, okay, so within the first one that you’ve mentioned, how do you do that?”

So, you keep drilling in one question at a time, one cluster at a time, and just make sure there’s stuff that really belongs there that genuinely answers that sub-question, so you’ve got a hierarchy and you keep going down. Don’t stick with the platitudes. Make sure you do dig and make sure that the idea at the top doesn’t just say, “We provide storm insurance,” but, “We provide this kind of storm insurance to this kind of people.” Make sure those messages are really specific.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I think that’s probably the name of the game is to like stop and spend some time and think about it, because as I was going back and forth with this insurance broker, “Hey, nice job.” He’s fast in responding to those emails and gave me like a sentence or two, but it’s like, “Yeah, but that’s not really what I want.” So, ultimately, I went with a different insurer. Wah-wah, that’s what’s at stake.

Davina Stanley
Well, you know what, I had the very same conversation with my insurance provider yesterday, and I went and got another quote. So, I’m completely on the same page with you there. I think being specific but also your point there about avoiding. And I see this being a real challenge in corporates now with Slack and these messaging services are being used a lot. It’s this constant flick, flick, flick, flick, flick rather than, “Hang on, stop a sec. What are they really asking here? What’s at the heart of that question? Why are they really asking that?”

And if you can put yourself in their shoes just for a moment, say, “Actually, I know they’re asking that but that’s a symptom of what they really need,” and address what they really need while including the symptom just in case you’re wrong, I think that’s part of the game, isn’t it, to stop these endless chains of conversation in Slack and email and so on that go off on tangents.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Davina, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Davina Stanley
Oh, anything else I would like to mention. I’d just say that I think people are not natural-born communicators very often. I think when they’ve got complex things to say, actually it is something that requires practice but it can be done by anyone.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Davina Stanley
So, the idea of being a natural-born communicator perhaps speaks a bit more to charisma and to presence than it does to delivering something of real value.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now, can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Davina Stanley
A favorite quote. Well, I like the one from Picasso, which is all about. The idea that you must know the rules before you can break them. And you think of his artwork and how on the surface it looks so not well-driven, it looks so random in many ways, but he absolutely understood the rules before he was breaking them so that he could make a comment with it rather than just being random.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Davina Stanley
Favorite book. At the moment, I’ve just finished reading one called The Diamond Hunter, and it’s by a woman called Fiona McIntosh, and it was a really beautiful story.

Davina Stanley
But, having said that, a business book, my latest favorite business book is Free to Focus by Michael Hyatt. And that has really changed the way I work and made me a lot more productive but also a lot more focused on the things that I really enjoy. His concept of a freedom compass and living in the desire zone has made my executive assistant far busier, far more interested in her work, she’s got a lot more to do, and it certainly liberated me to do the stuff that I think is fun.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Davina Stanley
A favorite tool? PowerPoint.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Davina Stanley
Well, I’m going to come back to what I did this morning before our call actually, and that is to get up early and just allow the day to begin rather than being thrown into it.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that seems to connect and resonate with folks, they quote it back to you often?

Davina Stanley
Oh, you know what, it’s that concept of designing the strategy. Most of the people that I worked with and I see them later, they’ll say that they now spend an awful lot more time thinking about their communication before they deliver it, and that although that feels a bit uncomfortable, it saves them a lot of time. So, do that. Think first. Do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Davina Stanley
My website is ClarityFirstProgram.com.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Davina Stanley
Oh, I do. I’d encourage them to go through their emails and just pick five random ones that they’ve sent in the last week, and read them with fresh eyes, and ask themselves how quickly their audience can glean the key message. If they write a lot of papers, perhaps pick a paper instead and skim it. And can they get their message in less than a minute, ideally, less than 30 seconds? See whether that can be done because in an ideal world, they’ll be able to.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Davina, this has been tons of fun. I wish you lots of luck in your communication adventures.

Davina Stanley
Thank you so much. Lovely to talk with you.