fear | Up Front Communication

So you are not outspoken…

Mar 11, 2014 Posted by sergy@upfrontco.com Confidence Comments Off

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.

Valuable lesson: How to make stress your friend

Oct 16, 2013 Posted by sergy@upfrontco.com Performance, Uncategorized Comments Off

In my talks on communication and public speaking, I commonly address the flight-or-fight response that difficult speaking situations trigger. While I do train people on how to physically manage their distress symptoms (such as shallow breathing, elevated blood pressure, and the like), the way you perceive the stress response matters hugely. As McGonigal points out, if you view your body’s stress response as one of positive, preparatory excitement instead of negative, performance-shattering fear, you can learn how to use stress to your advantage. You achieve this view through practice, observation, and mindfulness. So watch the video, learn, and apply!

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.

Fear-based communication

Aug 20, 2012 Posted by sergy@upfrontco.com Tactics Comments Off

How many messages do you encounter in a day? Discounting the ones that come from your own head (and lord knows those can be interesting), how many bits of info do you process on a daily, hourly, or even minute-by-minute basis?

Let’s dig a little deeper: how often do you consider the tone of those messages? This is a pretty important question when it comes to evaluating the suitability or reliability of information. In our hyper-marketed world, the emotional tone of professional communication is one of the first – and most effective – tactics in generating an overall message.

It is difficult to divorce emotion from communication; after all, we’re emotional beings and our daily experiences are largely understood through the emotional state in which we perceive them. Heck, the entire pathos branch of rhetoric is based around appeal to emotion. When creating a message, I always consider the sort of emotional effect I’m going for. Appealing to your audiences feelings is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. It’s another tool in your toolbox.

I draw the line, however, when emotional appeal becomes overly exploitative. This is very easily seen in advertising directed at a vulnerable audience base. Fear-based selling is common and nearly unavoidable. It sells products, services, and media outlets (think of the use of disaster and fear-based stories on most cable news channels). It is ruthlessly leveraged against audiences whose circumstances involve some form of instability or unpredictability.

As I’m preparing for the birth of my first child, I’ve been rummaging through plenty of pregnancy-related magazines. Expectant mothers and fathers are concerned about the health and future of their child, which makes them ripe for fear based advertising. In one issue of Fit Pregnancy, I counted no less than six advertisements for cord blood banking, three of which occupied entire pages, and one of which was a spectacular two-page spread. All of these ads featured messages such as “secure your family’s future” and warnings about the likelihood that the child will develop a severe or terminal illness. One particularly dreadful ad shows a picture of a baby’s foot, with each toe labelled thus:

This little piggy has a 1 in 17 chance of getting juvenile diabetes.
This little piggy has a 1 in 2 chance of getting cancer.
This little piggy has a 1 in 303 chance of getting cerebral palsy.
This little piggy has a 1 in 217 chance of needing a stem cell transplant.
This little piggy has a 1 in 66 chance of getting leukemia.

While it is reasonable for services such as cord blood banking to use illness information to sell their product, the way these ads communicate the risks borders on cruel. I believe that ethical communication involves educating your audience about different sides of an issue, not whipping them up into a panic that leads them to a blind purchase.

In today’s blog post, Seth Godin summed up top level business practices as having focus on “respect and dignity and guts…”. Most fear-based communications is neither respectful, dignified, nor gutsy. Don’t fall into the trap of relying on fear to communicate your message.