Up Front Communication

Helping people and businesses through the art of communication

So you are not outspoken…

There are people who come to me for help because they love speaking and want to get better at it.

There are people who come to me for help because they are terrified of speaking, because they are desperately uncomfortable being heard and raising their voice, or because their shyness has started to get in the way of their work.

Invariably at some point, the fearful or reluctant to-be speakers express the same reservation:  “But I’m just not an outspoken person!”  (Or, as often as not, “but I’m not outspoken like you!”*)

Here’s the flaw in that statement:  they’ve equated being outspoken with speaking out.

Take a moment and bring to mind someone you consider outspoken.  The most likely image is someone bubbly, boisterous, and probably a bit larger-than-life.  You may love them or hate them, but they are impossible to ignore.  They usually have bags of energy and say what’s on their mind, damn the consequences – and for some bizarre reason they can get away with it.

Now think of someone you’ve seen speak out.  They are absolutely impassioned about their message and what they have to say,** but that’s where the similarities end.  Some people think of a person with a soft voice and demeanour.  Others conjure up an image of someone with fire blazing in their eyes who simply couldn’t keep quiet any longer.  Others still think of a person who stood up with a carefully prepared message, notes in hand; maybe the paper trembled.  Sometimes the speaker has a raised voice, sometimes they don’t.  Sometimes their words are strong and powerful, sometimes they are hesitant and tremulous.  In all cases, though, their message is heard.  Their message is important.

Speaking out is about delivering an important message.

It requires you to open your heart.  It requires you to open your mouth.

But it does not require you to be outspoken.

 

*I find the “I’m not outspoken like you” comment hilarious, probably because I have to muster up a pretty considerable amount of courage to don an ‘outspoken’ mantle.  It is exhausting work.

**That’s what makes speaking out so courageous; the message is so important that it becomes bigger than the speaker’s fear.  But this is a topic for another day.

Don’t say sorry

“Sorry” is quite possibly one of the most pernicious words I hear in regular conversation. When used in its truest sense, a sincere sorry is lovely – both strong and vulnerable in the way in admits and accepts responsibility, or empathetic in the way it expresses understanding. These uses, however, are heard with woeful infrequency.

More often than not I hear sorry used as reduction term, as a form of pre-emptive verbal submission. We say sorry when we give an opinion, say sorry for asking for help, say sorry before speaking up in meetings, say sorry as a way to fill silences between sentences. On one hand, this compulsion can be seen as a throw-away word.  We have lots of those, little words we use to fill in sound space when our brains are working.  The danger of using sorry as a filler or an opener is that is has the same effect on our thinking as standing with our shoulders hunched and gaze low.  It diminishes us in our own mind.

Whenever I have heard sorry used as someone’s go-to opener when they begin to speak, it has never resulted in them giving the impression of confidence or competence.  This is unfortunate; one of the worst offenders in my circle of acquaintances is a remarkably competent man who gives good ideas and input.  Yet instead of presenting his thoughts and ideas fearlessly or with pride, he physically and verbally shrinks, peppering his phrases with sorry.

Don’t be sorry for what you have to say.  Don’t even think sorry for what you are going to say.  Don’t think or feel sorry for giving your thoughts voice or for “taking up” your listeners time.  Putting your ideas forward is an act of generosity, and conversation is an act of sharing. So share without restraint. You can be polite without being sorry, so for everyone’s sake, do so!

Lost the groove

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

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

Communicating Intimately #2: The Experience

The funny thing about establishing intimacy with an audience is that it doesn’t necessarily matter whether you, the speaker, feel that an intimate moment has been shared.  Like just about any desired emotion, what really matters is that your audience feels it.  They, quite frankly, don’t give a damn about what’s going on in your own head, and neither should you.  The audience’s focus is on their own personal feelings and experience.  Your focus also needs to be on your audience’s experience.

What constitutes an intimate experience for your audience, be it an audience of 1 or 1000?  It’s when they feel that you, the speaker (or manager, or persuader, or whatever you may be) gets them.  They feel that you understand them, their context, their desires, their needs, their wishes.  They feel that you care about their problems and are helping them improve their own lives on an individual level.  Because they believe that you do (or would) understand them, they feel that you can also relate to them, that the two of you have something in common.  That feeling of connection can happen whether you are sharing a one-on-one conversation or you are speaking to an anonymous group of people comprised of individuals you will never actually meet.  It doesn’t matter that you, the speaker, feels this connection.  Your audience feels it.  Because they feel it, they will most likely accept what you have to say as right and/or reasonable.

Your job is to create that feeling of connection and intimacy.  The difficulty is that you as the speaker become wholly responsible for generating that feeling.  The speaker must be willing to forgo every consideration of their own comfort and constantly, constantly, constantly strive to establish an intimate connection with the audience.  The audience doesn’t – and shouldn’t – give a crap about your own state.  Your job is to project whatever it is you need to project to create intimacy.

Are you physically, mentally, or emotionally tired?  That doesn’t matter.  You need to appear energised and alert; the audience must see that you are energized about speaking to them.  Energy means you care.

Are you completely bored about the topic at hand?  That doesn’t matter.  The audience needs to believe that you think that topic is the most important thing you could be speaking about at that moment.  If you show that you don’t care about the topic, then neither will they.  Boredom is the death of intimacy.

Are you uninterested in or lack knowledge about your audience?  That doesn’t matter.  You must either find something about them that interests you or be able to flawlessly imitate interest.  The audience absolutely must feel that you find them worth your interest if they will allow an intimate connection to be established.  Do your homework about your audience and find something out about them that interests you; become knowledgeable about the people you are speaking to.  If your audience is small, you may potentially discover something about them on an individual level.  If your audience is large or you don’t have the means do find out much about them, then research the company they work for, or the area they live in, or the culture they come from, or their demographic, or their interests.  There is always, always, always something you can learn about your audience that will help you become interested about them.

Are you disdainful about your audience?  Then fix that attitude, fast.  It doesn’t matter if your experience or qualifications leads you to think you are somehow better than them.  Your audience will pick up on your disdain within moments of you starting to speak.  Something will betray you – the words you use, the posture you adopt, your tone of voice, a way of behaving that you never considered.  Once your audience picks up on this, they will reject you and everything you have to say.  If you are approaching a speech or conversation with feelings of superiority or disdain, then you again need to research your audience and learn something about them that you can respect.  Intimacy cannot exist without respect, and respect is the antidote to disdain.

Are you in a foul mood?  Then do something before you meet your audience that improves that mood.  Go for a walk, meditate, look up funny pictures of cats.  It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as it makes you feel better.  If you are surly, your audience will become surly.  No one wants to connect with a cantankerous swab.

Are you an anxious or nervous speaker?  Learn some techniques to control your anxiety.  Stage fright is normal, but you must appear confidence.  Audiences want to connect with strong, confident speakers – speakers who look and act as though they can help them solve their problems.  Learn how to project confidence externally even when you are quaking internally.

You, speaker, need to set aside your own state of being and focus entirely on what will create the desired state of being to those you are speaking to.  So what if you felt that you just delivered the best speech of your life and that you really felt a connection with your audience?  The real question is, did your audience feel the same way?

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