Practical Eloquence Blog |

Why You Should Learn Public Speaking – Even If You Hate It

By Jack Malcolm / 9.3.2019 / No Comment

You may hate the idea of speaking in front of groups, and there’s nothing wrong with that. A lot of people feel the same way. I used to feel the same way early in my career. But I’m going to explain why you should develop at least some reasonable proficiency in public speaking, even if your work does not require it.

The ability to speak in front of large groups of people is one of the most important skills you can develop to propel your career, even if you don’t do it regularly as part of your job description. That’s because it increases your influence, makes you a better thinker, boosts personal confidence, and makes you a better communicator in other modes as well.

Influence

Public speaking has immediate practical benefits. It gives you more exposure both inside and outside your organization, and you’ll be seen as more of a leader by those who count.

As a knowledge worker, your value is directly dependent on your ability to effectively transfer that knowledge effectively to the relevant stakeholders. Public speaking allows you to transfer that knowledge wholesale to a much wider audience. If you think of yourself and your personal brand as a startup, public speaking is the best way to make your personal influence scalable.

Maybe you’re not that interested in increasing your personal influence for selfish reasons, and that’s very noble of you. But having greater influence helps to advance causes or ideas that you care about. And if you learn the art of communicating your ideas in a way that aligns with the way others think and what they need, others will care about them as well.

Thinking

Beyond practical reasons, public speaking has intrinsic benefits that carry over to other aspects of your work and life. It’s no accident that rhetoric was at the center of education for so many centuries. Very smart people for over two thousand years have known that it is the incubator of leadership skills, because it teaches one to think and to communicate ideas.

When you craft and deliver a speech, you get two valuable forms of feedback that improve your thinking. The first is self-generated, which comes when you prepare. Frequently, we don’t really know if we understand an idea until we try to put it into words that others will understand. It’s called the illusion of understanding; I frequently suffer from it myself. I might read an article that makes perfect sense in my head, but when I try to articulate it out loud or on paper, I realize how shallow and patchy my understanding truly is.

And, knowing others are going to listen critically forces you to find objective support for your ideas, which strengthens your grasp of topics even if you already know them fairly well. Every single time I prepare a presentation, I learn more about the topic than I knew going in.

Second, if your topic is engaging enough to spark questions and discussion, it’s the purest way to evolve and improve your thinking through competition with other sharp minds. In fact, public speaking is a form of deliberate practice, in which you push your communication to the limits of your abilities and then get immediate feedback on your performance.

Confidence

Public speaking is like New York: if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. When you learn that you can enter a room full of complete and potentially hostile strangers, and win them over to your way of thinking, no job interview or one on one meeting need ever intimidate you again. And, because public speaking is one of—if not the greatest—fears that people have, simply overcoming your pre-speech jitters is great training for so many other challenges in life.

Communicating and Connecting

Finally, public speaking makes you a better and more influential speaker in one on one communication, because you learn to express your thoughts in a listener-friendly fashion that captures their interest and addresses their interests. It makes you a better writer, for the same reason.

It teaches you to think and adapt on your feet, which can make you a better interviewee, a more effective salesperson, and a more persuasive contributor to meetings.

In my own career, I was lucky enough to learn how incredibly useful public speaking can be while I was still in my early 20s, thanks to a friend who shamed me into attending my first Toastmasters meeting. I went with great trepidation, but I found the environment to be so relaxed and supportive that within two or three meetings I had totally changed my attitude and gotten over my fear. Within a few months, the bank where I worked took notice of my abilities, and increasingly had me speak at various functions. In a way, it’s no exaggeration to say that learning to speak in public changed my life.

So, if you have been holding back, I urge you to take that first step. Take a class, hire a coach, join Toastmasters, commit to speak somewhere, so that you don’t have a choice, and just do it. You will be glad you did.

Success

Always Be Re-Learning

By Jack Malcolm / 8.28.2019 / No Comment

I’ve just had a humbling realization. I re-read some of my old posts on personal productivity, and I was struck by two things. First, without false modesty I have to say there is a lot of wisdom in the ideas I’ve written about (mostly because I’ve learned them from others). Second, imagine how much better off I would be today if I had actually stuck to those ideas after I wrote about them!

For example, one article was entitled, Five Powerful Principles for Reducing Waste in Personal Work, and it described several excellent tactics to organize work, increase focus, and reduce wasted effort. It was part of a series I wrote a few years ago about applying lean principles to personal work, and it did make a significant difference in my productivity at the time. But for some reason I drifted away from those disciplines over time.

It’s a great example of the entropy that goes on in our minds. Any structure that you build is going to deteriorate over time, unless you occasionally maintain, repair or refresh it. This goes for mental structures just as much as for physical ones. It’s not simply forgetting; as I read some of these articles, I easily recalled the facts and concepts; the raw materials are still there, but like ancient stone columns lying half-buried in the dirt, they no longer function as originally intended.

Fortunately, there’s good news. Unlike a physical structure, a mental structure can easily be re-built and even improved if you so desire. You just need to go back and relearn what you learned and then discarded.

How much useful information have you learned that you have buried deep in your mind? What have you learned and forgotten that you would like to re-learn? How much more productive or successful would you be today, if you had sustained your original enthusiasm for something long enough to turn it into a solid habit?

I believe in lifelong learning just as much as anyone else, but there’s always the risk that, in chasing after new lessons, you may forget some of the old.

So, I challenge you to the same challenge I’ve given myself: choose a book you read once that made a big impression on you, and go back and re-learn its lessons. You may be surprised to learn what you once knew.

If I can do it, so can you.

Sales

How I Learned to Sell Intangibles

By Jack Malcolm / 8.19.2019 / No Comment

When I was starting out in my career, I went for a job interview with a financial services firm. Before the interview began, they asked me to take a multiple choice test to determine whether I had the right stuff for the role, I guess. A few minutes after I took the test, a guy came out and told me the interview was cancelled. He explained that I had zero talent for selling intangible services, so it would be a waste of time to even talk to me.

I guess I must not have listened closely when he informed me of my enormous handicap, because I’ve made a very successful career selling nothing but intangible services for several decades now.[1] I’m not saying it was always easy, but I learned a few things along the way that have helped me tremendously, and which I share in this post.

So what?

The first tool I had going for me was a lifelong habit of always asking SO WHAT? any time I heard or read new information. I always wanted to know, “What does this mean to me, and what does it mean for me?” It was a useful way of thinking, but it truly became a powerful tool only when I learned (quite by accident), to direct the question outwards, to preemptively answer the SO WHAT? question in the mind of my customer. So what, you might ask, how did that change my selling style? I quickly figured out how to describe our (intangible) financial services not in terms of what they were or how they worked, but in terms of the tangible ways that the customer’s life would change if they used them: how they could produce more widgets, build that big new warehouse they were dreaming of, have more zeros on the bottom of their income statements.

Make it personal

Next, I learned that since customers can’t see or feel your intangible service, their minds pay attention to the tangible things that they do see. The most tangible thing they see—often the only tangible thing they see—is you. They make predictions about the quality and potential value of what you’re selling unconsciously, based on the tangible signals they see: Do you look professional, do you look them in the eye and smile to show you care about them? Does your body language project confidence; does your voice sound warm? Do you ask penetrating questions; do you answer questions candidly and directly?

SAVE it

After many years of just doing it, I started systematically studying the science and craft of persuasive communication, and a lot of what I learned I distilled down to my own acronym: SAVE. SAVE stands for Stories, Analogies, Visuals and Examples. Any one of these can turn an abstract concept into a “real” experience in the customer’s mind. Make sure you have a few good stories of how you helped a customer with a similar need, or better yet, make the customer the hero of their own story through asking great questions. Use analogies to express unfamiliar ideas in terms of things they know well. Use visuals to bring those stories and analogies to life, and don’t limit yourself to slides: some of the most charismatic speakers are those who can paint word pictures that seem as real to the listener as anything you could show on a screen. Finally, use examples put flesh on the bones and show that you’ve “been there and done that”.

By learning to always ask SO WHAT?, by taking special care with the personal relationship, and by putting SAVE in my toolbox, even someone with no talent like myself can make a good living selling intangible services and ideas. Imagine what you’ll be able to do with them!

[1] I’m not sure what it says about the validity of these types of tests, but that’s a topic for a different day.

If you're right, don't duck for cover.

Uncategorized

When Is It Your Duty to Disagree?

By Jack Malcolm / 8.8.2019 / No Comment

When the group consensus says one thing and you think another, should you speak up? When do you have a duty to disagree?

Common sense tells us there are a lot of good reasons to keep quiet. We all know you “need to go along to get along”, and “the nail that sticks out gets pounded down”.

In his new book, Conformity: The Power of Social Influences, Cass Sunstein says there are two main reasons we don’t speak up even when we disagree with the group. One reason is that we may be wrong. If the question is complicated or we lack complete information, we may not be totally sure of our own position, so we look to what others are saying or doing for information. Second, we crave acceptance by our group, and disagreement threatens that acceptance.

These two reasons can exert enormous power even when the answer is fairly clear-cut. Solomon Asch conducted some famous experiments in which subjects were shown a line, and then asked to select which one of three lines matched the length. It was a simple task, and by themselves, they were right almost 100% of the time. But when others in the room (who were secretly planted by the researchers) chose a different—and wrong—line, they got it wrong 37% of the time. Even though it was obviously wrong, more than a third of the time, they let the group consensus win. And the majority were willing to keep their mouths shut: in twelve iterations, 70% of subjects got it wrong at least once.

That still leaves a third of people who were willing to speak up and disagree with the group, but remember that the question was pretty clear cut. I don’t have statistics, but it’s a safe bet that when the question is more nuanced, rugged individualists are few and far between.

Lack of disagreement makes a group run more smoothly, but there may be a price to pay. When getting along becomes more important than results, performance can suffer. Investment clubs that are formed on the basis of social connections perform worse than those formed by people who weren’t socially connected, for the simple reason that members were much more likely to openly disagree. Unanimous decisions were worse than split decisions.

It reminds me of the story of GM CEO Alfred Sloan who once ended a meeting by saying:

“If we are all in agreement on the decision – then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”

The “go along at any price” crowd think that those who disagree are selfish, because they put their own views ahead of the group’s. But the truth is, disagreement comes with a price, so if you’re willing to pay that price for the good of the group, disagreement is a totally unselfish act. In fact, you have a duty to speak up, regardless of what it may cost.

The good news is that your risk may pay off. Even when the group seems unanimously united in opposition, remember that up to two thirds of them may harbor doubts but are afraid to speak up. By saying out loud what they are privately thinking, you may encourage them to join you. (And if you are right, you also have two other powerful allies on your side: time and truth.)

But be smart about it: choose your battles. Your best guide to decide whether you have a duty to speak up is the first rule of lean communication: you must add value. When you are aware of an opportunity to improve the situation but don’t take advantage of it, not only are you not adding value, you may even be subtracting value.

Are we all in agreement?