Can you give some practical how-to’s (or what not to do) when it comes to public speaking?

1. Don’t look down. One of the habits that people often develop is they continuously look down when thinking of what to say next instead of engaging with the audience. You disconnect with the audience, creating a separation. If you continually create that separation, those small little bits of disconnect often produce a distance between you and the people you’re trying to affect.

2. Don’t pace. I actually heard someone give advice suggesting that in order not to pace, they would clench their butt cheeks so not to walk around; but in my humble opinion, it doesn’t help someone stay at ease. Plus, your butt will be pretty fatigued. The reason we pace is because we haven’t worked at staging our presentation. When an actor works with a director, their movements are staged – not faked, but staged. They know where they’re going, when they’re going there, and why they’re going there. Otherwise, they stay in one spot. When we work with beginners and with A-listers (top of their fields), we often ask them to evaluate themselves on a number of fields. The number where both of these groups rate themselves the lowest is blocking and staging (where a performer is moving to at any given point in the performance).

3. When telling a story, there’s no need to tell the audience you’re telling them a story. Just tell them the story. Additionally, there’s no need to ask them to tell you a story. God forbid someone in the audience says, “No, can you talk about X instead?” Just tell the story.

4. All audience interaction should be proportionate to the amount of trust you earn. Often times speakers take for granted if audiences are willing to participate and then the speaker will ask them to do things or say things that the speaker hasn’t yet earned. For example, I saw a speaker start a speech by saying “Please raise your hand if you’re in debt.” Now, if you’re Oprah or Tony Robbins, you can do anything. They know you. But this audience most likely doesn’t know you and isn’t comfortable sharing their deepest darkest secrets to strangers. It can be confrontational and put them on guard, which reduces your ability to connect with them. Part of our jobs are public speakers is to break down barriers, so that we can make deeper and stronger connections with our audiences. We hear a lot about the value of bringing authenticity to the table. In your opinion, what does that look like?

Authenticity has become quite the buzzword, and sometimes the advice you’re given when you’re looking for public speaking help is to just be yourself. Frankly, that might not always be the best advice because there’s many different aspects to the self. As I discuss in Steal the Show, the role you play in one situation is different than the role you play in another situation. For example, the role you play with your friends from college is different than the role you play representing your company on a sales call. Plus, fact of the matter is, we’re not always in the mood to give the presentation that is necessary at that particular moment. So, if you’re just being yourself, what are you going to do: give a presentation and say, “I don’t really want to be here, I’m kind of annoyed, you should have bought this product the first time I pitched it to you”? Of course not. You’ll be kicked out of that office faster than you can say, “I need help with my public speaking.”

So, at the same time, in order to be what people often think of as authentic, we don’t want to develop a persona in order to represent ourselves as anything other than who we actually are. We don’t want to behave in a way that we think others expect of us if that is not an authentic way of being for us. We want to amplify the best and most compelling parts of our personality and try to overcome some of the less productive aspects of our personality. For example, if your normally tend to be soft-spoken, monotone, and flat in your typical communication, just being yourself on stage may not get the job done. You’ll want to learn how to find contrast in your voice, your speech patterns, rhythm, pace, tonality and physicality, in order to be more engaging – because that’s your job in any given moment.

You speak a lot about creating a “personal brand identity” – can you break this down for our audience?

This is something that I go into detail about in chapter three of my first book in Book Yourself Solid. I think there are two main components to this:

1. Your “who and do what” statement (who you serve and what you help them do). It helps you clarify for yourself and others the result you produce for them because they don’t know if you’re relevant to them professionally unless you help someone like them get what they want.

2. Your “why you do it” statement (what you stand for, why you get up every day to do the work that you do). That’s what drives you emotionally, philosophically. It’s much more important, I think, than people realize because there are a lot of people who can help the same people you do to get what they want. And often, business owners compete on that rather than making the all important emotional, philosophical, and psychological connection with clients based on what they stand for. The people that are hiring want to know if you see the world the way they see the world. If you can get them on that, you are in. What are your best tips for being likeable and for relating to others?

People like friendly people, but if they don’t feel that you are real, they might think you’re from LA. Just kidding. I don’t want hate mail from people in LA. But, you know what I mean – that sort of phony fakeness that you’ll sometimes feel when someone says, “Let’s do lunch” and you know you’ll never hear from them. It’s essential to be friendly, but it’s also essential to be real. I don’t mean telling your neighbor you don’t like their new hairstyle. I mean real as in what we were talking about when we were addressing authenticity.

Additionally, if you want to be more likeable, work on being more empathetic. Excuse the generalization, but I think it’s safe to say that women are generally more empathetic than men. Many men can take a cue from the women in their life to work on empathy.

Finally, if you want to be more likeable, focus on being relevant. Relevant people are popular; popular people get the most attention; those with the most attention get the most business. If Webster’s called me up and said I can change any word in the dictionary, I would like to replace the word “marketing” with “relevancy,” because if you want people to pay attention to you (i.e., like you), focus on being as relevant as you can possibly be. If likeability is important, read Tim Sanders’s wonderful book, Love is the Killer App.

Ask someone else how he knows when he’s done a good job. For some people, the proof comes from outside. The boss pats you on the back and says your work was great. You get a raise. You win a big award. Your work is noticed and applauded by your peers. When you get that sort of external approval, you know your work is good. That’s an external frame of reference. For others, the proof comes from inside. They “just know inside” when they’ve done well.

We’re talking about metaprograms – the filters to your communication and influence. In my previous article, we evaluated how the same question can bring two completely different reactions, based on whether the individual being questioned is moving toward something or moving away. In this post, we are going to look at internal and external frames of reference.

What’s the difference? If you have an internal frame of reference, you can design a building that wins all sorts of architectural awards, but if you don’t feel it’s special, no amount of outside approval will convince you it is. Conversely, you might do a job that gets lukewarm reception from your boss or peers, but if you feel that it’s good work, you’ll trust your own instincts rather than theirs. That’s an internal frame of reference.

Let’s say you’re trying to convince someone to attend a seminar. You might say, “You’ve got to attend this seminar. It’s great. I’ve gone and all my friends have gone, and they’ve all had a terrific time and raved about it for days. They all said it changed their lives for the better.”

If the person you’re talking to has an external frame of reference, chances are you’ll convince him. If all those people say it’s true, he’ll often assume it’s probably true.

But what if he has an internal frame of reference? You’ll have a difficult time convincing him by telling him what others have said. It doesn’t mean anything to him. It doesn’t compute. You can only convince him by appealing to things he knows himself. What if you told him, “Remember the series of lectures you went to last year? Remember how you said it was the most insightful experience you’d had in years? Well, I know about something that’s maybe like that; I think if you check it out, you may find you’ll have the same kind of experience. What do you think?”

Will that work? Sure it will, because you’re talking to him in his language.

It’s important to note that all these metaprograms are context- and stress-related. If you’ve done something for 10 or 15 years, you probably have a strong internal frame of reference; if you’re brand new, you may not have as strong an internal frame of reference about what is right or wrong in that context. So you tend to develop preferences and patterns over time. But even if you’re right-handed, you still use your left hand in various situations where it is useful to do so. The same is true of metaprograms. You’re not just one way. You can vary. You can change.

What kind of frame of reference do most leaders have – internal or external? A truly effective leader has to have a strong internal frame. He wouldn’t be much of a leader if he spent all his time asking people what they thought of something before he took any action. And, as with all metaprograms, there’s an ideal balance to be struck.

Remember, few people operate strictly at one extreme. A truly effective leader has to be able to take in information effectively from the outside as well. When he doesn’t, leadership becomes megalomania.

After one of my seminars open to guests, a man came up with three friends and sternly told me, “I’m not sold!” He was doing everything he could to egg me on. It quickly became obvious he was sorting by an internal frame of reference. (Externally oriented people rarely come up and just tell you what you should do and how you should do it.) And from his conversation with his friends, it also became clear that he moved away from things.

So I told him, “I can’t convince you to do anything. You’re the only one who can convince you.”

He didn’t know how to handle this response. He was waiting for me to strut my stuff and have him reject it. Now he had to agree with what I said, because he knew it was true inside. Then I said, “You’re the only person who knows who would lose if you didn’t attend the course.” Normally such a remark would have sounded terrible to me. But I was speaking in his language, and it worked. Notice, I didn’t say he would lose if he didn’t attend. If I’d said that, he never would have. Instead, I said, “You’re the only one who knows” (internal frame of reference) “who would lose” (moving away from) “if you didn’t go.” He said, “Yeah, that’s true,” and he went to the back of the room and signed up.

Before I learned about metaprograms, I would have tried to persuade him by having him talk to other people (external frame of reference) who had taken the course, and I would have told him about all the benefits he would derive (move toward). But that would have been the way to get me interested, not him.

It references once again Dr. Newberg’s theory that “the right words spoken in the right way can bring us love, money, and respect, while the wrong words – or even the right words spoken in the wrong way – can lead a country to war.”

https://twitter.com/MakadiaHarsh/status/1605193635749822465?s=20&t=Wz6fPK8zXZaTCw7DE0u-yw

Can you give some practical how-to’s (or what not to do) when it comes to public speaking?

1. Don’t look down. One of the habits that people often develop is they continuously look down when thinking of what to say next instead of engaging with the audience. You disconnect with the audience, creating a separation. If you continually create that separation, those small little bits of disconnect often produce a distance between you and the people you’re trying to affect.

2. Don’t pace. I actually heard someone give advice suggesting that in order not to pace, they would clench their butt cheeks so not to walk around; but in my humble opinion, it doesn’t help someone stay at ease. Plus, your butt will be pretty fatigued. The reason we pace is because we haven’t worked at staging our presentation. When an actor works with a director, their movements are staged – not faked, but staged. They know where they’re going, when they’re going there, and why they’re going there. Otherwise, they stay in one spot. When we work with beginners and with A-listers (top of their fields), we often ask them to evaluate themselves on a number of fields. The number where both of these groups rate themselves the lowest is blocking and staging (where a performer is moving to at any given point in the performance).

3. When telling a story, there’s no need to tell the audience you’re telling them a story. Just tell them the story. Additionally, there’s no need to ask them to tell you a story. God forbid someone in the audience says, “No, can you talk about X instead?” Just tell the story.

4. All audience interaction should be proportionate to the amount of trust you earn. Often times speakers take for granted if audiences are willing to participate and then the speaker will ask them to do things or say things that the speaker hasn’t yet earned. For example, I saw a speaker start a speech by saying “Please raise your hand if you’re in debt.” Now, if you’re Oprah or Tony Robbins, you can do anything. They know you. But this audience most likely doesn’t know you and isn’t comfortable sharing their deepest darkest secrets to strangers. It can be confrontational and put them on guard, which reduces your ability to connect with them. Part of our jobs are public speakers is to break down barriers, so that we can make deeper and stronger connections with our audiences. We hear a lot about the value of bringing authenticity to the table. In your opinion, what does that look like?

Authenticity has become quite the buzzword, and sometimes the advice you’re given when you’re looking for public speaking help is to just be yourself. Frankly, that might not always be the best advice because there’s many different aspects to the self. As I discuss in Steal the Show, the role you play in one situation is different than the role you play in another situation. For example, the role you play with your friends from college is different than the role you play representing your company on a sales call. Plus, fact of the matter is, we’re not always in the mood to give the presentation that is necessary at that particular moment. So, if you’re just being yourself, what are you going to do: give a presentation and say, “I don’t really want to be here, I’m kind of annoyed, you should have bought this product the first time I pitched it to you”? Of course not. You’ll be kicked out of that office faster than you can say, “I need help with my public speaking.”

So, at the same time, in order to be what people often think of as authentic, we don’t want to develop a persona in order to represent ourselves as anything other than who we actually are. We don’t want to behave in a way that we think others expect of us if that is not an authentic way of being for us. We want to amplify the best and most compelling parts of our personality and try to overcome some of the less productive aspects of our personality. For example, if your normally tend to be soft-spoken, monotone, and flat in your typical communication, just being yourself on stage may not get the job done. You’ll want to learn how to find contrast in your voice, your speech patterns, rhythm, pace, tonality and physicality, in order to be more engaging – because that’s your job in any given moment.

You speak a lot about creating a “personal brand identity” – can you break this down for our audience?

This is something that I go into detail about in chapter three of my first book in Book Yourself Solid. I think there are two main components to this:

1. Your “who and do what” statement (who you serve and what you help them do). It helps you clarify for yourself and others the result you produce for them because they don’t know if you’re relevant to them professionally unless you help someone like them get what they want.

2. Your “why you do it” statement (what you stand for, why you get up every day to do the work that you do). That’s what drives you emotionally, philosophically. It’s much more important, I think, than people realize because there are a lot of people who can help the same people you do to get what they want. And often, business owners compete on that rather than making the all important emotional, philosophical, and psychological connection with clients based on what they stand for. The people that are hiring want to know if you see the world the way they see the world. If you can get them on that, you are in. What are your best tips for being likeable and for relating to others?

People like friendly people, but if they don’t feel that you are real, they might think you’re from LA. Just kidding. I don’t want hate mail from people in LA. But, you know what I mean – that sort of phony fakeness that you’ll sometimes feel when someone says, “Let’s do lunch” and you know you’ll never hear from them. It’s essential to be friendly, but it’s also essential to be real. I don’t mean telling your neighbor you don’t like their new hairstyle. I mean real as in what we were talking about when we were addressing authenticity.

Additionally, if you want to be more likeable, work on being more empathetic. Excuse the generalization, but I think it’s safe to say that women are generally more empathetic than men. Many men can take a cue from the women in their life to work on empathy.

Finally, if you want to be more likeable, focus on being relevant. Relevant people are popular; popular people get the most attention; those with the most attention get the most business. If Webster’s called me up and said I can change any word in the dictionary, I would like to replace the word “marketing” with “relevancy,” because if you want people to pay attention to you (i.e., like you), focus on being as relevant as you can possibly be. If likeability is important, read Tim Sanders’s wonderful book, Love is the Killer App.

Ask someone else how he knows when he’s done a good job. For some people, the proof comes from outside. The boss pats you on the back and says your work was great. You get a raise. You win a big award. Your work is noticed and applauded by your peers. When you get that sort of external approval, you know your work is good. That’s an external frame of reference. For others, the proof comes from inside. They “just know inside” when they’ve done well.

We’re talking about metaprograms – the filters to your communication and influence. In my previous article, we evaluated how the same question can bring two completely different reactions, based on whether the individual being questioned is moving toward something or moving away. In this post, we are going to look at internal and external frames of reference.

What’s the difference? If you have an internal frame of reference, you can design a building that wins all sorts of architectural awards, but if you don’t feel it’s special, no amount of outside approval will convince you it is. Conversely, you might do a job that gets lukewarm reception from your boss or peers, but if you feel that it’s good work, you’ll trust your own instincts rather than theirs. That’s an internal frame of reference.

Let’s say you’re trying to convince someone to attend a seminar. You might say, “You’ve got to attend this seminar. It’s great. I’ve gone and all my friends have gone, and they’ve all had a terrific time and raved about it for days. They all said it changed their lives for the better.”

If the person you’re talking to has an external frame of reference, chances are you’ll convince him. If all those people say it’s true, he’ll often assume it’s probably true.

But what if he has an internal frame of reference? You’ll have a difficult time convincing him by telling him what others have said. It doesn’t mean anything to him. It doesn’t compute. You can only convince him by appealing to things he knows himself. What if you told him, “Remember the series of lectures you went to last year? Remember how you said it was the most insightful experience you’d had in years? Well, I know about something that’s maybe like that; I think if you check it out, you may find you’ll have the same kind of experience. What do you think?”

Will that work? Sure it will, because you’re talking to him in his language.

It’s important to note that all these metaprograms are context- and stress-related. If you’ve done something for 10 or 15 years, you probably have a strong internal frame of reference; if you’re brand new, you may not have as strong an internal frame of reference about what is right or wrong in that context. So you tend to develop preferences and patterns over time. But even if you’re right-handed, you still use your left hand in various situations where it is useful to do so. The same is true of metaprograms. You’re not just one way. You can vary. You can change.

What kind of frame of reference do most leaders have – internal or external? A truly effective leader has to have a strong internal frame. He wouldn’t be much of a leader if he spent all his time asking people what they thought of something before he took any action. And, as with all metaprograms, there’s an ideal balance to be struck.

Remember, few people operate strictly at one extreme. A truly effective leader has to be able to take in information effectively from the outside as well. When he doesn’t, leadership becomes megalomania.

After one of my seminars open to guests, a man came up with three friends and sternly told me, “I’m not sold!” He was doing everything he could to egg me on. It quickly became obvious he was sorting by an internal frame of reference. (Externally oriented people rarely come up and just tell you what you should do and how you should do it.) And from his conversation with his friends, it also became clear that he moved away from things.

So I told him, “I can’t convince you to do anything. You’re the only one who can convince you.”

He didn’t know how to handle this response. He was waiting for me to strut my stuff and have him reject it. Now he had to agree with what I said, because he knew it was true inside. Then I said, “You’re the only person who knows who would lose if you didn’t attend the course.” Normally such a remark would have sounded terrible to me. But I was speaking in his language, and it worked. Notice, I didn’t say he would lose if he didn’t attend. If I’d said that, he never would have. Instead, I said, “You’re the only one who knows” (internal frame of reference) “who would lose” (moving away from) “if you didn’t go.” He said, “Yeah, that’s true,” and he went to the back of the room and signed up.

Before I learned about metaprograms, I would have tried to persuade him by having him talk to other people (external frame of reference) who had taken the course, and I would have told him about all the benefits he would derive (move toward). But that would have been the way to get me interested, not him.

It references once again Dr. Newberg’s theory that “the right words spoken in the right way can bring us love, money, and respect, while the wrong words – or even the right words spoken in the wrong way – can lead a country to war.”

https://twitter.com/MakadiaHarsh/status/1605193635749822465?s=20&t=Wz6fPK8zXZaTCw7DE0u-yw