being human | Up Front Communication

Off the Introspective Cuff

Sep 27, 2013 Posted by sergy@upfrontco.com Connecting Comments Off

One of the keys to being able to ramble out a good, solid off-the-cuff or spontaneous speech is introspection – and lots of it.

The purpose behind this introspection isn’t to indulge in endless navel-gazing. That’s what Facebook and Instagram are for. This self-reflection is to develop an acute awareness of your values, your personal drivers, and your thoughts on life, the universe, and everything.*

When making spontaneous speeches, we need to rely on tidbits of information that we hold in our head. There isn’t time to ponder and compose an answer, and we may be lacking data critical to making an informed argument. We can, however, always give our opinion on matters. This is where the introspection comes in: if we spend time thinking about how our own brain works, we can address subjects from a personal angle. This may not result in a speech with heavy hitting evidence and data to back up your opinion, but it will result in something (relatively) thoughtful. You can speak to how you think about the topic or situation, about what affects your views and opinions, about how it relates to your own context. And – prize of prize – you can do so with sincerity because you are ultimately revealing a part of yourself to your audience, and you take the time to think about yourself and your context.

Speaking is about sharing. We don’t always have the luxury of being able to share facts, but we can always share a piece of ourselves. But in order to share ourselves, we must understand ourselves first.

*42.

Lost the groove

Jul 9, 2013 Posted by sergy@upfrontco.com Creating Comments Off

It is remarkably easy to get out of a solid groove. The groove you lost may have been one centred around a good habit you had, or one for a skill you built up and were maintaining. Either way, we can break out of these with surprising rapidity, losing the characteristic we worked so hard to establish.

You have probably heard the expression “it’s like riding a bike.” Have you ever climbed back on a bike after a long hiatus from riding? I have. It was hilarious and dreadful at the same time. I wobbled back and forth, found the breaks touchy and unnerving, and couldn’t make the sort of confident, sharp turns I remembered doing as a teen. Granted, it only took a few minutes to get most of my old riding skills back, but sharp turns eluded me for a good day or two…or three.*

Speaking, writing, making good conversation, interpreting messages – these are skills that are effortless when we’re in our groove and damned difficult when we aren’t. We often take our ability to make conversation or write a good blog post for granted, but neither of these things are easy. The longer we wait to resume those activities, say by hosting a dinner party with friends from different social circles, the harder and more intimidating it becomes and the more we avoid it.

I was recently jarred out of my blogging groove by some business regarding a family-owned company that my husband and I were involved with. The situation completely sucked away all my reserves of mental and emotional energy. Despite the fact that this commotion had very positive effects for my own family, it was still exhausting. I cut myself some slack for a couple of weeks while my husband and I worked our backsides off dealing with the problem. Sometimes you have to cut yourself some slack. But the slack got away from me; I went from giving myself some time for a mental vacation to making excuses not to blog or even go online to falling back on the worst excuse of all: “I’ve got nothing to say.” Last night I was whining about it to my husband. He said I needed to clean up my office (which became a disaster over the past month) and then sit down and post something. Anything.

He was right.

If a groove is worth developing, it is worth maintaining. It’s harder to re-establish one than it is to simply keep it going. I continued giving lectures and professional workshops during my maternity leave so that I could maintain my skills as a speaker and instructor. I’m posting this naval-gazing drivel because it is better that I get off my backside and put out one whiny, self-indulgent, “reflective” piece and then get on to making good stuff than it is to sit around and wait for perfection.

If you have lost your groove, don’t expect to produce perfect work while you are getting back into it. It isn’t easy to watch yourself produce crap where you once produced shiny gems. But you need to do it. So put on a noseplug, clean your office, and produce some crap so that you can get back into the habit of producing gems.**

*My anxiousness about falling and getting some nasty abrasions fuelled the slow return of the making-sharp-turns ability. I can be spectacularly clumsy and have picked out an unreasonable amount of gravel from my knees.

**For the record, this post is going to embarrass the hell out of me shortly after I hit the “publish” button. But I’m hitting that button anyway because it is important that I do. The Groove demands it.

Conference Terror part 1: Permission

May 20, 2013 Posted by sergy@upfrontco.com Presenting Comments Off

Note: I haven’t decided how many instalments of this topic I’m going to do, but I do know that there’s a part 2 and 3 on the way…

Finding a venue to broadcast your message is easy; what’s scary is actually doing it. There are lots of ways you can practice speaking in front of groups or talking with people you don’t know. You can take responsibility for reporting current project activity at the next meeting at work. You can host a party where people outside of your social circle are invited (think baby shower, or a potluck for members of your sports club and their families). You can take on training initiatives for new hires. You can join Toastmasters and regularly practice in front of a bunch of people with similar speaking goals.

These are all good steps – they’ll ease you into the world of addressing a group or holding court. There comes a point, though, where these settings are no longer enough. Skill improvement requires constant challenge, and when you get comfortable in one setting it’s a signal to up the ante or change the setting.

A favourite challenge I issue to both myself and my clients is to find conferences or similar events and apply to speak at them. There thousands of these opportunities out there for every industry, every profession, every conceivable topic or crowd or interest or milieu. There are events happening in your hometown, or at least within an easy drive. There are events happening in places you always wanted to visit, giving you a good reason for a spot of travel. There are events that you’ve wanted to attend for your own reasons, and presenting at them can often result in a special registration price, or compensation for travel, or an honorarium. There are piles of reasons to give conference presentations a try.

So why is it so hard to convince people to do it? Because the emotional risk of applying for and speaking at a conference is much higher than it is at work, or Toastmasters, or the backyard potluck. When you apply to be a conference speaker, you need to invest time in creating a presentation and then submitting that presentation to the organizers for acceptance or rejection. If accepted, you are again faced with in front of a crowd, this time under some mantle of expertise, and the risk of rejection is again there. The crowd might love what you have to say. They might want to gut you alive. When faced with this kind of risk, our knee-jerk reaction is to assume the latter and run screaming for the hills. Most people loathe rejection and we avoid it like the plague. Applying to speak at events means we need to suppress our lizard brain that tells us to hide under the nearest rock.

When convincing my clients to apply for conferences, I often come up against a very interesting wall: the need to get permission from their boss. This is a risk-mitigation behavior: if my boss says yes, than someone else is deeming me as being smart or good enough to do this. It gives permission; not just permission to attend this event on company time or permission to spend company funds on travel, but permission to speak. Someone else thinks I’m worthy. If they don’t, then I can blame them for not letting me try. Behold the lessening of risk and dodging of emotional responsibility! By asking permission of an authority figure, we take the onus and emotional risk away from ourselves and place it elsewhere. It’s not me, it’s them.

To hell with permission, I say.

Why does your boss have authority over your voice? Why let a manager tell you that you have nothing to say?

So your boss won’t give you the time to present? Take vacation days. You aren’t permitted to speak at a professional event because you can’t be a representative of your company? Strip your company out of the presentation. You don’t have anything to say about work? Then find an event completely unrelated to work. I got my start speaking by presenting at nerd conferences about topics like video game soundtracks and the different manifestations of deus ex machina in sci-fi TV series. I was interested, so I spoke. I can usually find one or two events my clients could apply for in a 15 minute Google search.

It’s when those events are found that the real issue comes up. It flicks across their eyes – fear, apprehension, the certainty that they aren’t worthy of speaking about that topic at that event. I sympathize; those are feelings I still experience myself.

At some point, you have to stare those feelings down and say to hell with it. To hell with permission. You don’t need permission, you need to speak. And if you look outside yourself for that permission, you might never find it. So dig deep. Admit that you have something to say, and know that there are people who want to hear you say it. Then put it out there. Find the events, create your proposal, and send the email. The worst that can happen is that they say no, and if that happens you can take that proposal, tweak it a little, and throw it at the next event and the next event and the next. Submitting those applications require permission from nobody but yourself.

Hugh Macleod illustrates the problem and solution beautifully:

Next time: From permission to application

The wall

Mar 16, 2013 Posted by sergy@upfrontco.com Connecting Comments Off

When we feel under threat, misunderstood, ill-used, or otherwise hard done by, we tend to put up walls. They are our mental defence mechanism, a way of deflecting conversations that might make us feel bad, or uncomfortable, or wrong.

When we say that someone “put a wall up between us,” we usually refer to someone becoming quiet and stony when the conversation gets heated. Silence is definitely a type of wall. But it isn’t the only type.

Some people build their walls out of words. They fill the space between them and the person they’re speaking to with noise. Maybe they don’t let the other person get a word in edgewise. Maybe they turn the conversation into a strange sort of two-way monologue, saying only what is racing through their head and not taking time to address or even listen to the other person’s input. Still others use words to re-direct and deflect uncomfortable conversations on a tangential topic. This is as much a communication wall as the silent treatment, only it is masked with a flood of unhelpful verbosity.

What kind of wall do you build? Do you choose to shut down or refuse to shut up? What can you do differently to break your wall down?

Freedom from updates

Jul 9, 2012 Posted by sergy@upfrontco.com Time out Comments Off

Communication is a boon, a blessing, the only way to get things done.

Things that facilitate communication are boons, blessings, necessary to our daily life at work and play.

If the above statements are true, why is burnout higher than ever? Why do we have to manage our communications and contact with so many different people? Why do many of us feel the need to apply a task-management approach more suited for the office to our regular interactions with friends and family?

The problem could be rooted in our attempts to communicate too much. The old adage that you can have too much of a good thing is absolutely true, and when it comes to sharing with other people, we are gorging ourselves sick on constant superficial interactions. At work and at home we are connected with email, internet, land-line, mobile phones, “smart” devices, and an ever-evolving onslaught of social networking vehicles. All of these demand that our brains remain in constant social mode, ready to respond to someone else at a moment’s notice. This is an exhausting state to remain in all day, every day, akin to having your ‘game face’ on nearly every waking minute.

Unfortunately, this constant contact takes a toll on the quality of our communications. We rapidly come to prefer communication methods that appear less intrusive or that allow us to better choose when and where to communicate. We would rather get an email or text than call someone and have a real-time voice conversation. Our interactions then get reduced to little snippets of information that contain no depth and very little real connection. Instead of calling someone to chat about the weekend’s happenings, we “poke” them on Facebook or broadcast a 140 character info-bit on Twitter about Saturday night’s party. Meanwhile, we begin to dread the ringing of the telephone, and eventually start to want to unplug from the social networks and mobile phone (clanging bother-machines that they are).

I certainly fall prey to the lure of these mini-communication moments. My brain gives me a good rush of dopamine when I get a text or someone comments on my Facebook status update. But after a while, the desire to detach myself from that type of communication in favour for meaningful contact with a very limited number of people becomes less of a want and more than a need.

This last week, my husband and I went to an out-of-town wedding and took the opportunity to tack on two days of hiking in the mountains. We reconnected with family we rarely see, and then spent two blissful days out of cell phone range. Not once did I check my email, post a status update, or answer a text. My husband and I chatted a great deal, but also spent a lot of time in absolute silence. The silence was wonderful – we were together mentally and physically, but the noise of the world was hushed out by the tramping of our hiking boots. I didn’t have the slightest desire to post a happy status update or share an Instagram photo of the beautiful trails.

These time-outs should be experienced by even the most enthusiastic and dedicated communicator. If we never give ourselves time to sort out the noise in our own heads without broadcasting it to the world, how will we develop our ability to sort out the noise being exchanged between two people? Communication – even for pleasure – can be difficult and exhausting. We’ve traded quality for quantity. Sometimes, the severe restriction of quantity is the only thing that can improve the quality of the messages we’re trying to get across.

Give it a try. Go out for a day, and leave the cell phone behind. Give yourself the gift of freedom from communication – no status updates, no sharing, no other people’s inputs distracting you away from the communication going on inside your own head. It can be tricky at first, but it quickly becomes wonderfully freeing.

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