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Three Misconceptions about Public Speaking Anxiety that May Be Hurting You

By Jack Malcolm / 10.19.2012 / No Comment

I’ve often wondered how many fine speeches go undelivered, and how many smart people go unnoticed because they fear getting up in front of a group to speak. In this post, I’d like to point out some misconceptions that may be holding them back from their true potential.

Mistake #1: You think you get more nervous than everyone else before a presentation or a speech. Sure, it’s common knowledge that public speaking is the top fear in America today, just behind death. (As Seinfeld said in one of his sketches, that means that if you’re at a funeral, you’re better off being in the coffin than delivering the eulogy.) But that common knowledge does not comfort you; you see others confidently taking control of the stage and compare yourself unfavorably. They might get a little nervous, but they don’t suffer the pangs of anxiety that fill your mind in those excruciating minutes before it’s your turn to speak; they don’t know the doubts that bounce around in your brain the night before the big presentation; they’re not wrestling with the real possibility that your throat will constrict and squeeze the first words out of your mouth into a high-pitched squeak.

The real truth is that everyone does get nervous. I’ve made my living speaking to groups for 20 years, and I still get nervous. Some of the best-known actors and performers have struggled with stage fright throughout their distinguished careers, among them Barbra Streisand and Harrison Ford. Cicero, one of the greatest orators in history, said: “I turn pale at the outset of a speech and quake in every limb and in all my soul.” Mark Twain said “There are two kinds of speakers: those who are nervous and those who are liars.”

Mistake #2: Everyone will be able to tell how nervous you are. Because you’re the expert (otherwise, someone else would be the speaker that day) and you’re well prepared (right?), you may be more concerned about appearing nervous than about flubbing your material. They will notice your rapid shallow breathing and hear your heart beating right out of your chest, and that will make them doubt you and mistrust your message.

The real truth is that you seriously overestimate the extent to which others can tell your internal feelings. Your feelings are perfectly obvious to you, but they are hidden inside your mind—they don’t leak out nearly as much as you might think. It’s called the illusion of transparency, like when you look through a mirrored window—although you know you can see out but others can’t see in, it still feels like they may be looking right at you. Studies show that speakers rate themselves as more nervous than the audience thinks they are. In some of those same studies, researchers have found that merely informing speakers that their nervousness is not visible, often makes them feel less nervous. Consider yourself informed.

Mistake #3: Nervousness is bad. You think that your anxiety will keep you from performing at your best, which makes you even more anxious about your performance, which can lead to a vicious circle of doubt.

The truth is that your nervousness is a normal feeling of arousal in your mind that is helping you gear up for extraordinary performance. It’s a manifestation of the fight or flight syndrome, which turbocharges your body and primes your mind to perform at greater than normal levels. Nerves show that you care, and in fact, if you’re not nervous, that’s when you should be worried. Self-confidence may lead to complacency, which may have contributed to President Obama’s flat performance in his first debate. Embrace the feeling of nervousness before you get up to speak, be glad that you have that extra fuel that’s going to add energy to your speech and your gestures, and will actually make you look even more confident than you feel.

To sum up, your nervousness before a presentation is a secret asset that will make you a more forceful and dynamic speaker, as long as you view it properly. If this short post can convince one person to deliver a speech in site of their fear, it will be more than worth it.

Book reviews - Productivity

Practice Perfect

By Jack Malcolm / 10.12.2012 / No Comment

Having trained salespeople for twenty years, I’d like to think I know a thing or two about effective training. But having read Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better, by Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway and Katie Yezzi, I also realize that I can further help my students and my clients by taking some of my training sessions up to a whole new level.

By now it’s well-known that the most important factor in mastery of a skill is thousands of hours of practice. Taking this idea one step further, what you need to consistently get better is deliberate practice, which is about repeatedly identifying specific areas that need improvement, practicing to get to a certain standard, getting immediate feedback and then practicing again until you get it right. This book takes the idea of deliberate practice one step further, by showing specifically how to isolate the key areas that need improvement, how to practice, and how to give and receive feedback. It’s organized into 42 rules for “getting better at getting better”.

The key theme of the book is that practice does not make perfect—it makes permanent. If you practice the right things wrong, or the wrong things right, you will permanently encode substandard performance. In other words, practicing the same thing over and over in the wrong way will only make you better at doing it wrong. Or, if you practice the wrong skill, you will get very good at something that will not contribute to your success. So, you first have to figure out what to practice by analyzing the domain you want to succeed in and then identify and prioritize the key skills that will have the greatest impact. Then, devise the proper drills to practice to a measurable standard so that you can encode success.

I judge if a book is worth reading by how many useful and immediately practical ideas I take from it, and Practice Perfect has given me at least a dozen. In a general sense, I plan to incorporate less scrimmaging and more drilling into the skills portions of my training sessions. For example, sales training teaches a variety of skills and then usually culminates in a realistic role play or presentation, after which participants are critiqued and then sent on their way. The problem with realistic training is that each new skill may only be practiced once, if at all. Drilling is intended to be unrealistic, so that it can provide multiple concentrated opportunities to practice each skill. As the authors say, use scrimmaging to assess, and drilling to improve.

While this may sound like common sense, it can actually be hard to sell to potential clients. In a tough economy everyone is justifiably tight with their training dollars and time spent away from the field, so they try to cram as much into shorter training sessions as they possibly can. The question that must be answered by sales executives or training professionals is: is it better to learn a lot of things imperfectly, or a few critical things perfectly?

One way out of that conundrum, as the authors note, is to plan training sessions meticulously, in order to get as much possible effectiveness out of every single minute. They note that in the NFL it has now become common to have “pre-game” meetings to prepare for practices, and that review of practice tapes is as important as game tapes. This idea is actually amazingly easy to follow even for full-time professionals who don’t have the luxury of much dedicated practice time. Almost everyone carries a tablet device or smartphone that takes video, and imagine how your skill level could improve if you would rehearse a sales presentation or questioning sequence before an important sales call.

Another way out of the conundrum is to provide a proper framework and standard for the most important skills and then help managers institutionalize the practice of practice within their organizations. In today’s fiercely competitive war for talent, it may be better to have a strong culture of practice and then hire for coachability and willingness to learn, as opposed to demonstrated skill.

The authors are education experts and have developed their techniques and rules for training classroom teachers, but they also weave in plenty of examples from sports[1] and business, and make it very clear that the ideas and techniques are universal to the proper learning of a skill. The first half of the book is devoted to individual skill improvement, and the second half offers practical advice for institutionalizing perfect practice within the organization.

Whether you are an executive seeking ways to improve the performance of your employees, Little League coach on the weekends, or a motivated self-learner, Practice Perfect is the book for you.

[1] In fact, it appears that the legendary basketball coach John Wooden is their patron saint, and you could certainly do worse than that in a book about practice.

Book reviews - Sales

Selling Fearlessly

By Jack Malcolm / 10.9.2012 / No Comment

As a specialist in complex sales, I rarely read anything that relates to one-call-close sales. I read Selling Fearlessly: A Master Salesman’s Secrets For the One-Call-Close Salesperson because Bob is a friend, but I’m recommending that you read it because it’s so good. By the time you finish it, you’ll probably feel Bob is your friend, too.

Terson did not sell complex systems to large businesses—he sold advertising on telephone book covers to small businesses, not what you would consider sophisticated sales. Yet, anyone who went on 12,000 sales calls during a 43-year career is bound to have learned a lot about selling, about consistent success, and about the psychology of persuasion. He also has a special gift for teaching, explaining and telling stories, which wraps the valuable lessons of a lifetime into a compelling and entertaining package.

In fact, Selling Fearlessly was a “one-call-close” for me, in that I read most of it through in one sitting while on a flight. But I have already started going through it again, because there are pearls of wisdom disguised as “common sense”, the kinds of things we all think we know but definitely don’t do enough of.

The book is in four sections, with about a dozen short chapters in each that tell a story or make a valuable point. Each chapter is opened by an apposite quote. My favorite is “Personality can open doors, but only character can keep them open,” quoted in chapter 4. Another quote dovetails beautifully with my own Bottom-Line Selling approach: “Treat your role strictly as a fiduciary responsibility and you’re on the right path to selling glory.” (I planned to steal that one, but when I tried it out on my class full of salespeople today, I had to explain what “fiduciary” meant.)

Part I is about the selling life, and the Mound Road story that opens the book (and Terson’s career) introduces us to the man who is our mentor and guide for the rest of the book. Everyone will draw their own lessons from Part I, but for me the key is the importance and dignity of the sales profession, especially since we’re all salespeople in some way.

The next three sections cover one leg of “The Triangle”, made up of mental attitude, work habits and salesmanship. Part II, on mental attitude, is mostly full of ideas that we already “know”, but constantly need reminding of, such as motivation, belief, and persistence. The key takeaway from this is that you don’t have to be born with a natural aptitude for selling; as long as you’re willing to work hard, take responsibility for your own and your customers’ results, and develop a tenacious belief in yourself despite disappointment and rejection, you can create a successful and rewarding career for yourself.

Part III is full of practical advice about work habits. Terson was way ahead of some of the current thinking on applying lean methods to selling—codifying and standardizing his work processes and following them consistently week by week, year over year. Although it would not be possible in today’s rapidly changing world, I found it fascinating that he only made three changes to his selling process in 43 years!

Part IV is about salesmanship. If you have any experience and success in complex sales, you’ve heard of his techniques before and won’t agree with all of them, but occasionally we need reminders that planning, developing relationships and challenging your buyers sometimes needs to be supplemented by the ability to communicate convincingly, deal with objections, and close a wavering decision maker.

Selling Fearlessly will enthrall, teach, and inspire you.

Persuasive communication

How Romney Won Round 1

By Jack Malcolm / 10.4.2012 / No Comment

I don’t agree with pundits who said before last night’s debate that Romney had to win. As the challenger to a sitting president, all Mitt Romney had to do to win last night was simply to keep from losing. The ethos that the office itself brings to the incumbent, and Obama’s own reputation for eloquence, are tremendous advantages. So, the major goal of a challenger is to be perceived as being in the same league, and for that you only need a draw.

He easily accomplished that objective, and went even further, emerging as the clear winner of Round 1. How did he do it?

To avoid losing, any competitor must defeat the opponent’s strategy. The Obama strategy against Romney has three principal lines of attack:

He is an extremist
He is uncaring and out of touch
His policies are fluff—no detail

Extremist? Romney had to show he is a reasonable person, and he accomplished this through his demeanor and his words. His demeanor was confident yet respectful, and he never once lost that hint of a smile, even when being attacked. He went out of his way on several occasions to stress his points of agreement with the President and even to praise some of his decisions and policies. When he did attack, it was directed against the policies, not the person. He cited his own success in working with an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature in Massachusetts.

Uncaring? Romney actually used more personal anecdotes than Obama to show that he had listened to ordinary people and even though he never used Clinton’s “feel your pain” line, he used words such as crushed and hurting.

No detail? This is where Romney had the clearest advantage. His answers were detailed and specific, and in delivering them he showed an impressive grasp of detail and memory. At one point, I thought he was going to have a Rick Perry moment, when he said, “The fourth thing is…” and his eyes rolled upward, but he pulled it out. Too much detail can definitely be a liability, but in this situation it was the right thing to do. We all know about Romney’s impressive record, but last night was the first time he showed the personal qualities that made that record possible.

To be sure, Romney also had some good fortune in the form of Obama’s performance last night. People will debate whether he was overconfident, or trying too hard to be his usual cool self, or just not as good in unscripted situations as he is behind a teleprompter, but he clearly left a lot on the table last night.

That said, Romney did one other thing that put him over the top. Like a fighter who attacks an opponent’s clear weakness, he stayed relentlessly on message, keeping to his key theme of job creation all night.

Round 2 is going to be so much fun! Will Obama come out swinging? Will Romney’s inexperience in foreign policy be an insurmountable obstacle?

Having said that, I have to say it was a pleasure to watch two intelligent and articulate individuals go at it last night. This was a debate I would not be embarrassed to have foreign audiences watching.