As We Speak: How to Make Your Point and Have It Stick - by Peter Meyers and Shann Nix

Date read: 2021-02-05
How strongly I recommend it: 10/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)

Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.

Best book I've read on how to not only give impactful presentations, but how to communicate more effectively so people will listen. This book covers all mediums from the all-company presentations on a stage to communicating through email or video/phone with a small group. Recommended for anyone trying to improve their impact when presenting & communicating.

My Notes

Visit www.standanddelivergroup.com, where you’ll see a prompt for “As We Speak.” Along with the forms you’ll find some bonus audio tracks there to supplement the reading.

You want more courage when you’re speaking? Speak in the service of something larger than yourself. Courage is easy to summon when you’re driven by a higher purpose.

Good communication is like good manners: it takes the other person’s well-being into account. It’s about being clear, relevant, and succinct—crafting your message in a way that’s easy for the other person to understand, absorb, and remember.

To truly communicate with another person, you need to think about what they need. Not just telling them what they want to hear—but understanding what the other person needs to feel, know, and experience in order to create a shift in their thinking.

My personal assessment: Your ideas are clear, relevant, and organized. Your delivery is dynamic and compelling. You’re bringing an appropriate level of energy, passion, and clear thinking that brings value to your listener. You’re not only inspiring people, but you’re creating results. After listening to you, people are ready to act—to do something. That’s High Performance Communication.

CONTENT
High Performance Communicators ask this question: what does the listener require, in order to make a new decision?

The three steps in the preparation process are:

Define your outcome. What do you want to achieve?

Find the relevance. Why should they care?

Clarify your point. What’s your message, in one memorable phrase?

In an effective conversation, there are three possible positive outcomes:

Your listener has an insight that shifts her mind-set. She sees things in a way that she didn’t see them before.

Your listener makes a new decision because of the conversation. The decision may be made in the moment, or the conversation may catalyze a later decision.

Your listener takes an action. She actually does something in your presence: stamps the form, signs the check, says the word “yes.”

So always state your outcome in terms of the listener’s behavior: “By the end of this talk, my listener(s) will understand / decide / take action on . . .”

Look for a way that you can make your outcome verifiable. You need to be able to check your progress, and know whether or not you’ve achieved your goal.

What three things does the listener need to know in order for you to achieve your outcome?

What does the listener need to feel in order for you to achieve your outcome?

Messengers deliver information; leaders generate experience. So raise your brand. Create a meaningful experience.

You find the relevance of your talk by simply asking yourself the question: why should the listener care? What’s in it for them?

So what’s the one thing that you want them to remember? Quite simply, your point is your message, boiled down to one memorable phrase or sentence.

Take three minutes to prepare before your next phone call. What do you want to accomplish?

For a quick and effective way to create the architecture of your talk:

Ramp (the beginning).

Discovery (the middle).

Dessert (the end).

Most speakers make their first mistake before they ever open their mouth. It’s a crucial one, and it will render everything you say meaningless. It is this: you assume that your listeners are listening to you. But they’re not.

A ramp is the first few sentences that come out of your mouth. It should immediately engage the listener’s attention, and set the stakes high enough that whatever comes next is of interest to him.

Why should they care? The answer to that question is a perfect opening to your talk.

You need to shift your attention away from yourself, and focus it on your audience. Abraham Lincoln, one of the most accomplished speakers in history, said, “When I am getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say and two-thirds about him and what he is going to say.”

A simple technique to ensure that your focus is on the other person is the I:You ratio, as defined by executive speech coach Patricia Fripp.1 How many times do you use the word “I,” and how many times do you use the word “you”? MASTER TIP: Get the I:You ratio right.

When you design your opening, make it sharp, clean, and fast. Hit the ground running. There is no time to waste.

The Seven Second Rule: You have only seven seconds in which the audience decides whether or not they’re going to pay attention.

Open with something meaningful and nourishing: something that shows the listener that (1) you understand their situation, and (2) you’re there to help.

Go for what we call “the clean open.” No names, no introductions, no greetings. Go straight in, and get straight to the point.

Don’t bury the lede. If you don’t hook them right up front, you’ve lost them forever. There are no second chances.

Open with the word "You."

Use a powerful statistic, or what we call a “sexy number.” For example: “About 20 percent of all U.S. heads of household have never sent an e-mail.”

Ask a question: “How many of you spend more than half your time in meetings?”

Shock them with a stat or comment.

Make a confession: Be vulnerable. “I’ve always been afraid of spiders. And the other day, in the boardroom, the CEO asked me to get rid of a spider he saw in the corner. Well ...”

Use the word "imagine": “Imagine this. It’s three years from now, the new gymnasium has been built, and our kids have just won their first basketball championship ...”

Tell a historical anecdote: “Once when General Dwight D. Eisenhower was under siege, he sent a sergeant out to do some reconnaissance. When he returned, General Eisenhower said, ‘Sergeant, give me a brief assessment of our position.’ The sergeant replied, ‘Sir, imagine a doughnut. We’re the hole.’ That’s a little what it feels like for us today ...”

Tell a story.

ROAD MAP
The road map for your talk should do three things:

It tells people how long you're going to be speaking.

It gives them a preview of your structure...and reassures them that you have one! “We’re going to look at developing leadership in terms of where we are today, where we need to be five years from now, and what we need to do in order to get there.”

It sets up the rules of engagement: People want to participate. Do you want them to ask questions as you go along, or would you prefer them to wait until the Q&A?

Keep the road map brief—no more than three items.

DISCOVERY
Because ideally, you are going to provide insights that stimulate your listener to make discoveries, rather than forcing information down his throat. Discovery can be as simple as someone realizing that he can finally make sense of a confusing topic. It’s an exciting activity for the brain—people enjoy the “Aha!” sensation of working things out for themselves.

We organize the discovery section into three Points of Discovery.

A leader doesn’t dumb things down; he takes complex things and makes them clear.

No matter how many items you have to discuss, chunk them into no more than three categories, or Points of Discovery.

SUMMARIZE
If you’ve been speaking for more than five minutes, after you have completed the discovery section, the listener needs a summary; he needs you to remind him of the big picture.

Summarize succinctly, with an emphasis on how the related parts all fit together.

Most people also get it wrong by putting the Q&A at the very end of the presentation. Bad idea! We say never end on Q&A—it’s too risky.

After the Q&A is over, you wow them with the grand finale.

DESSERT
Dessert is the part where you take back control of the presentation, and ensure that you finish on a high note.

The job of the ending, or dessert, is to create an emotion in the listener: “Before we close, I’d like to leave you with this thought. ...” Or you might try drawing a future picture for your listeners. “Imagine this ...”

In a situation where you’re communicating with your peers, and you want to get through the entire narrative before being interrupted, the classical structure is most powerful:

Ramp.
Road map
Three PoDs.
Q&A.
Dessert.

In communication we say, “No outline survives the CEO.” This means that your lovely, organized schematic is likely to be shattered by people throwing questions to you outside your given order.

The best structure for an executive presentation is to offer them a quick, clean ramp and road map, engaging their interest and letting them know the areas you’re prepared to explore. Give them a five-minute executive summary. And then open it up for questions. The majority of your knowledge and information will come out as you answer their queries.

In this case, the structure would be this:

Ramp.
Road map.
Executive summary of the three Points of Discovery.
Q&A that explores the three PoDs, in a flexible order.
Dessert.

STORIES
So, what makes something sticky? It should be: 1. Simple. 2. Emotional. 3. Vivid.

Stories put a human face on your data. Metaphors make things memorable. Active language is more compelling than business jargon. A refrain becomes a way of reinforcing your key point. Sharpening your Q&A skills will give you a chance to engage with your listeners.

A good story starts with three coordinates: (1) Where; (2) When; (3) Who: “Last summer, I took my nine-year-old son up the Amazon in a canoe .

A successful story starts with a platform. The platform is a stable, ordinary circumstance. Then you tilt the platform. The tilt is the unexpected element that throws the main character into a struggle to regain balance.

The struggle is what defines the story. No struggle, no story. The struggle is what makes it exciting, funny, inspiring, and emotional.

There comes a point in the story where the main character has to make a decision; a fork in the road. Again, the more difficult the decision, the more interesting the story. Work in an element of mystery; create surprise and delight your audience by doing something unexpected. Use reincorporation—allow elements to appear in the story, and then reappear.

Don’t tell the listener what to feel. Just describe the scene, and let him draw his own conclusions. Instead of saying, “He was nervous,” say, “His palms were sweaty.”

Where can you find a good story? Consider these sources:

History—either the history of your organization, or world history.

Your own life, or the lives of people you know, particularly in difficult situations where obstacles have been overcome.

Newspapers—current events provide a gold mine of topical stories.

Literature or the arts—classic stories lend great power and dignity to a talk.

Your children—kids are always a great source of stories that everyone can understand.

There are different types of stories. Two of the most useful are cautionary tales, which warn us of danger ahead, and inspirational tales, which talk about someone overcoming an obstacle.

There is a simple mathematical formula to building an inspirational tale: the bigger the dragon, and the smaller the hero, the more compelling the story will be.

To add more inspiration, create more difficulty and a longer path in order for the person to succeed.

The best stories are true ones. Authenticity has a ring that you simply can’t fake. Sometimes if you look more closely, your personal experience may furnish a perfect story for your topic.

Like a good song, any good speech will have one memorable “red thread” that weaves through it. Powerful political campaigns and speeches nearly always feature a refrain of some kind. Think Obama and “Yes we can.” Or Ronald Reagan’s famous “Tear down this wall” speech.

A refrain can be simple and pragmatic as well: “And that’s why we need to move quickly.” Or “We all need to work together.” Or “. . . because we know that you’ll make the right decision.”

Pick an element and repeat it. Keep returning to it. Anytime you repeat something, you create a pattern, and the brain loves patterns.

You’ve already done the hard work of finding your refrain, when you clarified your point. When you repeat your point more than once, it becomes your refrain.

Whenever you find yourself beginning to lose momentum, you can return to your refrain like a touchstone. It will reorganize your thoughts, and send you out again with a fresh bounce, while helping you to stay on point.

Q&A
Techniques to help you prepare for and master the Q&A process: Write down and answer for yourself:

The ten questions they are most likely to ask.

The ten questions you most dread. Rehearse your answers with other people who can give you feedback.

If there are no questions, ask yourself one that you have prepared ahead of time. Then answer it.

In a formal event, repeat your prepared question out loud before you answer it.

In a less formal environment, where it might seem odd to repeat the question, embed the question in the answer. This means that you repeat part of the question as you answer it. For example, if the question is, “What are you hearing from our customers?” you answer: “What we’re hearing is that customers are hungry for something new. They’re saying, ‘When is the new version going to appear?’ and they’re getting antsy.”

Embedding prevents this from happening, by ensuring that you answer in the modality of the questioner. For example, if he asks, “What’s your feeling on how things are going?” (feeling/sensory) you answer, “My feeling is . . .” By using his modality, you ensure rapport. This will make the listener feel heard, understood, and satisfied at a deep level. Embedding the question guarantees that you are playing in the key of the other person.

Another useful technique in Q&A is the paraphrase: “So, what you’re asking here is whether or not we have the funds. Is that right?”

Take the teeth out of an aggressive question by acknowledging the listener. Find something in the question with which you can agree.

After acknowledging the questioner, move your eyes and body away to include the rest of the group in a polite way. This keeps the questioner from getting too much power in the room, and prevents the two of you from getting locked into an “alpha dance” of superiority.

A few examples of useful reframing phrases: “This is a question about value / about long-term investment / about credibility / about personal ethics / feasibility / timing / leadership / resources.”

Reframing is not about trying to evade the question. What you’re doing is lifting the discussion out of the level of personal attack. This allows you to address the issue that listener was actually raising, without taking his emotional bait.

DELIVERY
On the audio track called “Vocal Variety” (available for free download at www.standanddelivergroup.com), we’ve given you some suggestions on how to develop your voice and expand your vocal range.

Volume means how softly or loudly you’re speaking. Where are the places where you can drop the volume down? Contrary to popular opinion, getting louder is not the only way to bring emphasis to a point. When you lower your volume, you are signaling that what comes next is important.

Pitch is how high or low the tone of your voice is. Pitch is one of the key indicators of the emotions of the speaker.

When the voice goes up, it signifies the more tender emotions: joy, compassion and sympathy. We naturally drop the pitch down to demonstrate confidence, certainty, power, and strength.

Raise in pitch is the way we signal empathy and excitement. This is a particularly good technique for men in management who need to express empathy or concern in dealing with an emotional topic.

It’s not a question of which note to play, but of whether you can create a variety in your range that paints a rainbow of emotion. Think of changing your tone to create distinctions between different ideas.

The speed at which you speak conveys levels of excitement or emphasis. If you’re speaking at a good pace, the places where you slow down convey to the listener that what you’re about to say is important.

The brain can process auditory information much faster than you can speak. What we often call “too fast” is actually a problem of rhythm. If you don’t find the natural pauses in your thoughts, they won’t have a chance to absorb the meaning. And if we mash our ideas and words together into one ongoing running sound, the result is monotony.

We shape the thoughts with our rhythm. As long as you create blocks of meaning so that the listener can absorb and digest an idea, you can talk very quickly and still be understood. To direct focus in a sentence, slow down. You can speed through the parts that are less important, and slow down to make your most critical point.

“There’s one thing I’d like to share with you guys” . . . PAUSE. It creates a quality of curiosity. The pause is where you create space for the other person to have an experience. That’s where discoveries are made.

An operative word is the word in any phrase that gets emphasis, and allows the listener to understand what you’re trying to say. Like using a highlighter to pick out the most important word, you can alter the entire meaning of a sentence by changing the operative word.

Make your body congruent with your words.

SPEAKING TO A CROWD
Plan your entrance. When you can control your entrance, enter from stage right, and cross down on a diagonal. Stage right is the speaker’s right.

In Western culture, since we read from left to right, entering from the audience’s left and moving to their right gives you a positive association.

Find a reason to smile slightly, and begin to make eye connections with the audience as you are walking on, before you reach the podium.

If you have to shake someone’s hand, it’s an advantage to enter from stage left. When you shake, your body will be open to the audience, and the guy standing stage right will have to turn his back on them.

If possible, try to avoid entering from the audience.

Be strategic about where you’re going to stand, if you have a choice. On every stage, there is a power point. It is generally the closest you can possibly be to your listeners, without losing sight of the periphery of the audience—i.e., the last person on the edge of the first row.

Stand so that from the audience’s point of view, you are to the left of the screen. Because their eyes move from left to right when reading, whatever is on the left-hand side has visual prominence. You are the most important part of the presentation, not the slides.

After you’ve entered, hit your mark and stop. Stand still, in heroic neutral for one beat.

It’s the thing that every athlete does right before an event—they breathe.

In the stillness, during the breath, see your listeners and allow them to see you. You are using one of your first seven seconds to send the most important message your listener needs to hear before you begin: “Boy, am I glad to see you.” If you can’t see your audience because of the spotlight, then pretend that you can. Imagine their faces as clearly as possible.

Begin your talk in heroic neutral. Heroic neutral is a relaxed stance, sternum lifted, arms loosely down at your sides.

A downturned palm signifies power, strength, dominance, and certainty. The open palm is generosity, sharing, openness. When you invite questions during Q&A, always use the inviting open palm instead of the accusatory pointing finger.

Mentally divide the audience into quadrants: front, back, left, right. When you look up, randomly connect with one person on the left, then one person on the right, one person in the front, etc. Try to share your time equally between the quadrants, making sure that you don’t forget the people in the back.

A linking phrase is like connective tissue; it links one point to another. Phrases like “So, how are we going to do this?” or “Why are we so confident?” or “Let’s take a look at the numbers in relation to last year” are linking phrases. They’re not terrifically important in and of themselves, and they’re not your main point. They’re there to connect one idea to the next. A linking phrase is a great place to move. You’re signaling with your body that you’re moving on to a new concept.

A landing phrase is a phrase that you want to land with special emphasis. You come to a point; the light bulb goes on. “We’re going to fight, using the facts!” To emphasize a landing phrase, you stand still. Never walk through a landing phrase; it diminishes the importance of what you’re saying.

Spend roughly 60 percent of your time center stage, 20 percent stage right, and 20 percent stage left. Vary your movement pattern; don’t always go right-center-left. Break it up.

TABLE TECHNIQUE
Low-status players twitch and fidget; high-status players use stillness to create a sense of presence.

Lean in to create intimacy or emphasis. Pull back to create space for someone else to speak.

If you’re in a situation where you can move around, gently take a few steps toward the people who are talking—but don’t look at them. Moving toward them will pull focus away from the whisperer and back to yourself, and they will generally stop.

Unless you’re talking about something sad or distressing, one of the best things you can do before you walk out onstage is to think of something that brings a slight smile to your face. Not a smug smile, but a smile that shows your general state as being one of enjoyment.

For a connected conversation, you look at one person, and speak directly to them. You stay with one person until the first comma, pause, or phrase in the thought ends, and then shift to another person for the next thought. This should amount to roughly three seconds per person.

ON-STAGE TECHNIQUES
The audience looks where you look. If you want to direct their attention to media, slides, or another person, you must turn your body and look at the object in question yourself. When it’s time to reconnect, step forward and draw their attention back to you again.

Notes are not a crutch that indicates weakness—notes are a smart tool.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind for those times when you blank:

Reboot - You’re not going to be able to solve the problem in your brain—you to have to use your body. Change your physical pattern. Do something different. Take a drink of water. Adjust the microphone. Take a step back, and step forward again.

Breathe

Vamp - Make small talk. Say, “Good morning . . . Hi . . . Good to see you.” It’s not your first choice for an opener, but it’s better than standing there like a statue.

Received wisdom in the theater states that if you can get your lines memorized a week before performance, you have time to move from focusing on the content to focusing on the delivery. You have to assimilate the content in a way that you can start to move, think, and speak while saying it—and connect with the audience at the same time.

We don’t recommend that you actually memorize every word of your content. But you do need to be familiar enough with what you plan to say that you can then turn your full attention to delivery. And this process should happen ideally at least a week before your presentation, so that the content has time to sink into your long-term memory.

Here’s a rehearsal process for you, based on the one used by professionals in the theater:

First, practice just the words, concentrating on sense and meaning. You can do this sitting down, or if you’re more comfortable moving around, you can get up on your feet. But the emphasis is working with the language, and exploring the narrative. Get your mouth used to the ideas. You can bump through the text, stop and go, think about where you want to land your points, what the operative words are. Practice your transitions. Familiarize yourself with the ideas. Think of it like learning a song.

Now you bring in the movement. What are you going to do with your body? How will you handle the slides?

What you want to do is block specific sections. Blocking is theater terminology for the process of planning where, when, and how actors will move around the stage during a performance. You’re going to design blocks of movement—a large-scale plan of action. For example, do you want to be sitting or standing for the first section?

You can hold a tech rehearsal. Whether you’re in a theater or a conference room, a tech rehearsal is the time for you to practice all the technical aspects of your performance.

A dress rehearsal is intended to be as much like the real thing as possible. The key to a dress rehearsal is that if something goes wrong, you do not stop. The show must go on. You do the entire presentation from beginning to end without pausing, dealing with bumps in the road as you will on the big night itself. This way you’re actually practicing what to do if something goes wrong.

Use this old photographer’s trick: while standing onstage, turn your back to the audience and hold your hand up in front of your face, at roughly eye level. Move around the stage, watching the way the light hits your hand. This approximates the way the audience will see your face in the light. There will usually be a dead spot on the stage, where the lighting is shadowy. Mark it and remember it—and stay out of it! There may also be a hot spot on the stage, where the light has a concentrated glare. Avoid this one, as well.

If you have any control over the lighting, or a chance to talk to the lighting technician before the event, ask for amber gels; these are filters that can be put over the lights. They warm the light in a flattering way, without making the stage look like a disco.

Twenty-four hours before you go onstage, you need supportive feedback only. What are you doing that is working well? Be specific when you ask—otherwise, people are all too happy to give you a long laundry list of what is wrong with you, and it’s too late to fix it anyway.

YOUR STATE
You move and breathe the way you do when you feel confident, passionate, and determined, your brain associates that movement with a corresponding emotion, and it will obediently supply that chemical reaction. Try this: Stand up. Lift your shoulders and your head. Look up. Put a big smile on your face. Punch both arms up into the air. Feel any different?

To feel joy, confidence, victory, lift your arms and hands up over your head, with a huge smile on your face, and you will feel close to the way you do after your team scores. If you want to feel generosity, use your hands the way you do when you’re giving a gift—generally with open palms, moving toward the person in front of you.

To assist you with this process, you’ll find an audio exercise in the download package (go to www.standanddelivergroup.com) that will put you into an ideal performance state. The exercise is called “Performance Preparation.”

The way you control the focus of the brain is by changing the internal questions that you ask.

What you want are questions that have this kind of powerful presupposition in them. This will drive the brain to produce a better answer, and produce a feeling of exhilaration rather than terror:

“What’s the best part of this presentation?”
“What am I most passionate about in this material?”
“What’s the most powerful way I can impact this audience?”
“How can I give them a gift?”
“How can I best inspire them?”
“How can I make a difference?”
“What’s the most exciting part of this event?”
“How do I know they want to hear from me?”

Not “Will I succeed?” but “How will I succeed?” Not “Will they ask me tough questions?” but “How can I use Q&A to build their trust?” The first question will get a negative answer. The second question presupposes excitement, so that’s what your brain will search for.

Note that there is a time to ask the tough questions, and explore everything that could go wrong in your talk. That time is one to four weeks before the event.

What if you started with the end in mind, and then created the beliefs that would drive you forward? What do you want to do in your life? And what are the beliefs you need to hold in order to accomplish your goals?

True confidence doesn’t come from talking yourself into something that isn’t true. It comes from transforming negative beliefs that are holding you back into empowering beliefs that drive you forward.

HIGH-STAKES SITUATIONS
High-performing teams and individuals don’t have fewer problems than anyone else. But they are more willing to talk about the problems they have.

Defining your outcome, and then focusing on it, can help you avoid this disaster. Phrase it this way: “By the end of this call/conversation, he will. . . .” For example: “By the end of this conversation, Anthony will commit to showing up to meetings on time.” This is one of the most powerful tools going, and yet people rarely use it. If you take thirty seconds before your next phone call to formulate your objective clearly in your head before you pick up the receiver, your chances of achieving your outcome soar. Visualize the conversation going smoothly—use your mind’s eye to see the experience you want to have.

As a rule, never talk for more than four sentences without stopping and getting a response from the other person.

Whoever asks the questions drives the dialogue.

Don’t offer a solution until he’s completely finished venting about the problem.

When in doubt, always overcommunicate. In the absence of any information, people will jump to the most negative conclusion.

CRISIS COMMUNICATION

Here's what we know for sure - The first thing that people need, at the base level, is certainty. You can’t move on to the higher-level needs until you deal with this one. Be honest with them about the things of which you are absolutely sure.

Only say the things you know to be absolutely true, or your credibility will be destroyed.

Here's what we don't know - “We don’t know how long this crisis is going to last.” Again, be honest. Hearing you speak with authenticity will calm them down.

Simply draw a ring around one or two of the main concerns in the situation, admitting that there’s no way to be sure of them.

Here's what I think - This is where you can move forward into the vacuum that is created in any crisis, and hold the space. You’re allowed to tell us your opinion. People want to know what you believe.

Here's what you can do - People need to contribute; they need to feel that they’re making a difference.

Here's what you can count on from me - Make a commitment. Be sure that it’s one on which you can follow through.

Here's why it's worthwhile - People need hope. It’s your job as a leader to create meaning out of the facts, and communicate that meaning to the people who are looking to you for guidance. What’s the reason for the suffering? How will the struggle make you stronger in the long run?

To ask or answer a question, make a single, uninterrupted point, or send data, use e-mail — don’t phone or leave a voice mail message.

Beware of I-itis - This is the disease where all your sentences start with “I.”

The cure for I-itis is proper application of the I:You ratio. Your reader wants to know what’s in it for him. Talk about his favorite subject—himself. Open with the word “You.”

“Since you’re concerned about how the team is performing, here are a few indicators that might reassure you.”

Before you make a phone call, take thirty seconds to clarify your outcome. What do you want to happen during the course of the conversation? Why should they care? What’s your message, in one sentence?

It changes your voice, and your listener will register the difference every time. It gives your voice a quality of aliveness and vitality. If you want to hold people’s attention, you’re going to have to dig deep and find that energetic level that will make it a pleasure to listen to you. A phone call involves the interaction of your voice and phone technology. So use good technology. Get off the speakerphone—it gives your voice an echoing, distant quality and makes you difficult to understand. Instead, invest in a good-quality handset or a headset. Speak into the mouthpiece, and keep it relatively close to your mouth. Call someone you trust, and ask them how you sound. Try to create a sense of warmth and intimacy. Newscasters are trained to imagine that they’re speaking into someone’s ear, instead of shouting into a crowd. Avoid monologues. Say three or four sentences and then pause to ask a question.

You lose the listener’s focus after four sentences. On the phone you need to keep your sentences short and move your ideas forward faster, or your listeners will get bored. Don’t repeat yourself.

AUDIO CONFERENCING
Create a road map - “We have one hour. In the first fifteen minutes I’ll present the findings, and then each of you will have five minutes to share your ideas as well. That leaves fifteen minutes at the end for us to have a discussion and make a decision as a group.”

Assign Roles - People tend to get passive in an audio conference. So use their names, and give them a job. “We’re going to hear from Bashir about his results. Jo Lin, I’d like you to be ready to step in with feedback after he’s finished. Anne Marie, please chime in with any relevant R&D along the way, and we’ll ask Ingmar to summarize for us at the end.”

Research shows that adult learners can stay tuned in to a lecture for no more than eighteen minutes before there’s a significant drop-off in attention. After eighteen minutes, make a shift. Tell a story, show a video, create a discussion, give them a break, ask someone else to speak, or engage in open dialogue with the group.

A point question might be, “Let’s look at this in terms of how it will affect us financially." "How will this affect us in terms of innovation?"

A double click question invites you to go deeper into a topic. “Say more about that.” “How does this relate to what we said earlier?” “What makes you say that?” “How do we know this to be true?” “What implications does this have for us?”

“Fritz, this is your region, you’ve got a lot of experience here. What do you think?” Avoid abruptly saying, “What do you think, Fritz?” with his name at the end of the question. This runs the risk of taking Fritz off guard and making him stumble.

CAMERA AND VIDEO CONFERENCING
Pay attention to what you wear - White will catch too much light. Solid, bright colors are the best. Avoid busy patterns—they create a zig-zag “moiré” effect in the eye of the camera.

Avoid excess movement - You’re doing a close-up, and any movement will be magnified. Cultivate “soft movements” with your hands, face, and body; avoid jerky, abrupt motion. Tics like playing with your hair, pulling on your ears, touching your nose, etc., on camera lower your status and make you look twitchy. Stillness conveys authority.

Look directly into the lens when you speak - This is the most important thing about using a camera, particularly if you’re working off a laptop. Because of the location of the camera lens on most laptops, if you are looking at your screen, the viewer won’t see your eyes. In a video conference, look into the lens when you’re talking, and then drop your eyes to your screen to watch his face as he speaks. It may feel strange at first—but it will create a greater sense of intimacy.

All of these new technologies act as magnifiers, allowing you to send your message out to increasing numbers of people, over longer distances than ever before. But remember that your message still connects to one person at a time.

FINDING YOUR VOICE AND MAKING IT HEARD
Developing presence is a process of subtraction, not addition. You don’t need to add anything. What you must do is take away the thing that is veiling your authentic self. Presence has to do with pulling back the curtains and peeling off the armor. It takes courage to be vulnerable in front of a group of people. But your authentic self is the well from which your leadership presence will spring. Allow the audience to really see you, without trying to hide or defend.

To practice tonglen, you breathe in whatever you are feeling, with the intention of breathing it right into your heart. You pause for a moment, to feel connected with all the people all over the world who are feeling the exact same thing, at this very moment. Then you breathe out relief, for yourself and for everyone else who is suffering. Tonglen reverses our usual habit of avoiding suffering and seeking pleasure. By turning toward your fear and breathing it in, then releasing it, you embrace your demons—and they vanish. Your poison becomes your own medicine.

The Masai tribe believes that words are like food—they should be offered with the intention to nourish.

When you stop worrying about what they think of you, and concern yourself with what you can bring to them, then any tendency you might have toward inauthenticity, charlatanism, or spin will drop away.

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My Notes