I recently came across an op-ed article in the New York Times by David Brooks that struck me as significant for the art of presenting. In his piece, Brooks examines "The Mental ABC's of Pitching" by the sport psychologist H.A. Dorfman. While the book is geared towards professional pitchers, I feel that Dorfman's advice can be extended quite naturally to presentations.

As told by Brooks, what Dorfman "offers is to liberate people from what you might call the tyranny of the scattered mind." This sort of tyranny is not closeted to baseball however: any highly demanding activity can be undermined by a lack of focus. The everyday mind is like an out-of-control chariot: without direction and jumping from one thing to the next, it is almost impossible to prepare for anything important. This is where mental discipline comes in.

I had a coach in high-school tell me that "you play the way you practice;" as I've grown older, I continue to see the truth of this statement. Through practice comes mastery. This is consistent with the story I tell in my workshop about Eugen Herrigel from "Zen in the Art of Archery." Herrigel spent 1 year learning how to stand, how to hold the bow and how to breathe before he ever put an arrow to the blow string. That intense practice frees up the mind from other distractions. This is also necessary in presenting. Now while I don't suggest you take a year to learn how to introduce yourself, nonetheless, master presenters must own their material and their technique in a way that they don't even have to think about it. There is simply no substitute for this type of practice. Mark Twain said it best, "It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech."

Returning to Brooks analysis of Dorfman, "by putting the task at the center, Dorfman illuminates the way the body and the mind communicate with each other." This is the essence of the teaching of our workshop: motivation follows action, not vice versa. If you change your behavior then you will change the way you think. As E. Thomas Berr PH.D put it in the The Tao of Sales: "It is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking than think yourself into a new way of acting." Indeed, this is the essence of the Zen way: through intense practice of mindfulness (being present right here, right now) the mind can be calmed and focused.

Just like a baseball game, a presentation is a spectacle, with a thousand points of interest. Nonetheless, master presenters reduce it all to a series of simple tasks, and at the center is the task of presenting well, nothing else. By putting the task at the center, the presenter helps to push away their expectations, nerve and ego, and by doing such they can calmly and adeptly connect with the audience, their material, and deliver a masterful presentation every time.

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What is the simplest way to move a conversation toward dialogue? Ask a Question!

Instead of making statements about what we believe, begin asking questions about what others believe.  As a conversation moves forward, continue to ask questions that relate directly and obviously to what the other person has been saying.

Dialogue: Its Component Parts

How do you balance advocacy and inquiry?

• Step back.
• Target your inquiry by asking questions to clarify what the other person believes.
• Examine the other person’s mental maps.
• Suspend your own assumptions.
• Learn before you try to influence.
• Advocate your opinions through carefully chosen questions and statements.

The Rewards

• Building rapport
• Building business relationships
• Extending your influence

Tips for Improvement >>

How customers view you or your products is garnered by a framework of assumptions, stories and images in their minds.

If you really want to influence someone, your first task is to understand how they think. An individual’s perspective on the world can be identified and “mapped.”

A model for asking questions:

Step 1. Neutral Prompts

Step 2. Define the Universe with Wide Questions

Step 3. Prioritizing Issues with Priority Questions

Step 4. Pursue Detail with Deep Questions

 

More About The Discovery Process In Business >>

 

Below, Toastmaster Trey Gramann gives a thoughtful and humorous speech entitled "A Map for the Soul."

One client approached me during a workshop and asked, "Terry, you are telling me to demonstrate more power and authority with greater volume AND you are telling me to be authentic. That feels like a contradiction to me. Can you help me with that?"

Having heard variations of this question over the years, I felt that I had a breakthrough in articulating my meaning that particular day.  I asked him, "If the desire to demonstrate greater power comes from deep inside you, and the realization of that in your style requires that you change, what could be more authentic than that?"

The question that I put to clients and to workshop participants is not, "What is your style?" as "What do you want your style to be?" Not, "Who are you?" but "Who do you want to be?"

Recently, I was introduced to Carol Dweck’s book, "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success".  I recommend it very highly. Dweck is a psychologist who has taught both at Columbia and Stanford Universities.

Her central thesis is that there are 2 basic mindsets that people operate from:

• The Fixed Mindset
• The Growth Mindset

For more on how mindset relates to communication style click here >>

Below, Carol Dweck speaks about The Fixed and Growth Mindsets. 

 

 

This video was sent to me by my meditation teacher.  It's a talk by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor.  Having a stroke the thought hits her, "This is so cool." 

As the caption reads on the TED Talks page:

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened — as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding — she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

From a public speaking / presentation skills standpoint:

• Dr. Taylor uses movement extremely effectively. 
• Her use of a very surprising prop may shock you but will certainly compell you to pay attention.
  
• Her expressive (though thin and reedy) voice expresses her emotional journey very effectively.
• She also demonstrates great humor, vulnerability, and passion.

She also offers her personal and scientific observations about how the two halves of the brain function:

• She uses an ineresting metaphor comparing the Right to a Parallel Processor and the Left to a Serial Processor. 

She says that the Right:

• Is concerned with This Present Moment.
  
• Thinks in pictures.
  
• Learns kinesthetically.
  
• Unites and connects us with others.

Meanwhile, the Left:

• Thinks linearly and methodically.
  
• Is focused on the past and the future.
  
• Picks out details, categorizes and organizes.
  
• Thinks in language. 
• Is the voice that says, "I am" and, hence, separates us from others.

It's a compelling and powerful story - well worth watching. BTW, this is an 18 minute video and it takes awhile to load. Or you can go directly to the TED Talk video here. 

When I first started leading presentation skills workshops in 1997, I had this notion that there must be a list somewhere of 20 rules for public speaking.  I imagined there had to be 10 rules for "Things You Must Always Do" and 10 rules for "Things You Must Never Do." 

For example, here are a couple "rules" that I've seen broken very effectively.

1) Moving all the time doesn't work.

I once had a client that finally blurted out in frustration, "Listen, Terry, I simply CANNOT be still.  It drives me nuts.  I have to be moving."  I thought about this clients situation and made a suggestion.  "What if you moved constantly but the rate of movement was very slow and deliberate?"  We tried it and indeed found that it could be a very effective style.

2) The speaker should never admit to having made a mistake.  After all, most of the time, the audience doesn't know.

During one workshop, a participant made an obvious mistake with something they had written on the flip chart.  Typically, I would coach them to simply fix the mistake without referring to it or commenting.  Instead, the participant said in an energetic voice, "Oh, my God, that is pathetic!"  His willingness to poke fun at himself charmed us all and the audience burst into raucous laughter.  He left a strong and very positive impression.

So, finally I have come to the conclusion that there is ONE rule which is incontrovertable: Nothing is absolute.

What follows is a delightful video from Darren Flemming, Australian Toastmasters Champion.  Darren is asked to speak spontaneously on the topic, "If you obey all the rules, you miss half the fun."

Reading The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth In Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt has been a revelation and a joy. Haidt is a teacher at the Univ. of Virginia and a social psychologist. He says his "corner is morality and the human emotions."

In the book, he lays out a path to happiness buttressed by psychological study and generous references to spirituality and philosophy. Here are a few nuggets that I'd gleaned so far (I am on page 101 of 243):

• Emotion is critical in decision making.

• Learning to understand, distract and coax the beast of our unconscious mind is critical to happiness.

  "An emotionally intelligent person has a skilled rider [conscious mind /reason] who knows how to distract and coax the elephant [our unconscious mind] without having to engage in a direct contest of wills" because the elephant will win such a contest every time.

• We make decisions based on unconscious emotion and justify them based on reason.

  "It is the elephant that decides what is good or bad, beautiful or ugly. Gut feelings, intuitions, and snap judgments happen constantly (as Malcolm Gladwell described in Blink), but only the rider can string sentences together and create arguments to give to other people."

• Negative emotions leave stronger impressions that positive ones.

  For example, "If you were designing the mind of a fish would you have it respond as strongly to opportunities as to threats? No way. The cost of missing a cue that signals food is low; odds are there are other fish [meals] in the sea … The cost of missing the sign of a nearby predator, however can be catastrophic. Game over …"

  This reminded me of the post that I made about reputation and transparency in June of 2007. One mistake can outweigh hundreds of successes when it comes to people's perceptions of you.

• Happier people have greater activity in the left side of the frontal cortex in the brain.
  Less happy people have greater activity in the right side of the frontal cortex in the brain.
• To change your level of happiness ("your affect"), you need to change your thoughts.
• The 3 best methods for changing your affect are:
  1) Meditation,
  2) Cognitive therapy,
  3) Prozac.
• The "happiness formula" is: H=S+C+V
  H = Happiness
  S = biological Set point (happiness determined by genetics)
  C = Conditions of your life
  V = Voluntary activities you do.
• Happiness is determined by strength and number of relationships.
• Activities that induced happiness are described as the "flow" state, a phrase coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

• There are 3 key qualities to "flow" experiences:
  1) "There's a clear challenge that fully engages your attention"
  2) "You have the skills to meet the challenge"
  3) "You get immediate feedback about how you are doing at every step."

  (Qualities that are present when delivering a well-crafted, successful presentation, by the way.)

• If you spend money, spend it on experiences, not on stuff - assuming you want to increase your happiness level.

• You can chart your own happiness and find out what activities are likely to make you happy online at the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center site here. (My chart is below.)

I am happy I found the book … or the book found me.

 

 

 Carol Dweck, a Psychology Professor at Stanford, has written a book titled, "MindSet: The New Psychology of Success." She posits that one's mindset is a greater determinant of one's ability to succeed than talent. She outlines 2 different mindsets: The Fixed Mind-Set and the Growth Mind-Set. A fixed mindset is one in which you view your talents and abilities as… well, fixed. In other words, you are who you are, your intelligence and talents are fixed, and your fate is to go through life avoiding challenge and failure. A growth mindset, on the other hand, is one in which you see yourself as fluid, a work in progress. Your fate is one of growth and opportunity.

Here's a terrific Nigel Holmes graphic that originally sparked my imagination. You can also find a recording of an interview with Moira Gunn and Carol Dweck here.

In this press release from Stanford, she recounts a story from the 6th grade:

When psychology Professor Carol Dweck was a sixth-grader at P.S. 153 in Brooklyn, N.Y., she experienced something that made her want to understand why some people view intelligence as a fixed trait while others embrace it as a quality that can be developed and expanded.

Dweck's teacher that year, Mrs. Wilson, seated her students around the room according to their IQ. The girls and boys who didn't have the highest IQ in the class were not allowed to carry the flag during assembly or even wash the blackboard, Dweck said. "She let it be known that IQ for her was the ultimate measure of your intelligence and your character," she said. "So the students who had the best seats were always scared of taking another test and not being at the top anymore."

Asked what seat number Dweck occupied during that memorable year, the professor paused, and silently raised her right index finger. "But it was an uncomfortable thing because you were only as good as your last test score," she said. "I think it had just as negative an effect on the kids at the top [as those at the bottom] who were defining themselves in those terms."

From that experience, Dweck became fascinated with intelligence, convinced that IQ tests are not the only way to measure it. "I also became very interested in coping with setbacks, probably because being in that classroom made me so concerned about not slipping, not failing," she said.

This idea resonated deeply for me. As a trainer, I am constantly interacting with people in a learning environment. I can clearly see behaviors in workshop participants that fall into one category or another.

Also, it parallels the Zen philosophy called Beginner's Mind. Beginner's mind is Zen practice in action. It is the mind that is innocent of preconceptions and expectations, judgments and prejudices. Beginner's mind is just present to explore and observe and see "things as-it-is."

Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi, author of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, captured it very simply with, "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."

Think of how a child approaches life and you will inherently understand beginner's mind. It's full of curiosity and wonder and amazement. "I wonder what this is? I wonder what this means?" Without approaching things with a fixed point of view or a prior judgment, just asking "What is this? What does it mean?"

When I give feedback to workshop participants, those in Fixed (or Expert) Mindset will react by explaining or defending themselves. They feel a strong need to counter any conception that they "made a mistake" by not doing a perfect execution of the task assigned in a given exercise.

Those in Growth (or Beginner's) Mindset react with a sense of humility and confidence. They are genuinely interested in hearing how they might improve their skills. They tend to be thankful for feedback and are quickest to laugh at their own foibles.

Which mindset do you possess? Dweck provides a checklist to assess yourself and shows how a particular mindset can affect all areas of your life, from business to sports and love. The good news, says Dweck, is that mindsets are not set: at any time, you can learn to use a growth mindset to achieve success and happiness