Practical Eloquence Blog |

Spring Cleaning for Your Mind

By Jack Malcolm / 4.3.2014 / 1 Comment

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged and increased constantly, or it vanishes.

Peter Drucker

Spring cleaning is an optimistic time, a time to refresh and revitalize your surroundings. Closets get cluttered, stuff gets lost, and things break down, wear out, or go out of style. The same thing can happen to our minds.

One of the side effects of the research I’ve been doing recently for my book on personal credibility is that I get to revisit books and articles that I may have read several years ago, and rediscover useful information that I had either forgotten or overlooked when I first read them. It’s always funny to see what I’ve highlighted or starred, then promptly ignored. Or maybe something I read then makes different sense now in light of different life experiences I’ve had or new things I’ve learned.

For example, I re-read some sections in Bruce Gabrielle’s Speaking PowerPoint: The New Language of Business about making your logic visible in presentations, what he calls the “above-water argument”. It has helped me better understand and express what I’m trying to say in my own book.

Whenever you read a book or take a course, you only retain and use a small part of what it contains. Besides the natural limitations of your memory, you will gravitate to one or two ideas or techniques, and as you use them more often they will become more firmly implanted into your routine while everything else will wither away.

For example, you might learn several different approaches to handling a price objection. In the days and weeks after the training, you try two or three approaches; maybe one works well, one bombs, and one is somewhere in the middle. You’ll focus on the successful experiences and drop the ones that didn’t work. But there’s a case to be made for revisiting the ones that didn’t work. Maybe they would actually work better in a different situation, or maybe times have changed. But you may never know because you’ve forgotten them—unless you do the occasional spring cleaning.

Here’s a few things you can do:

Toss out broken old ideas. Have you unlearned anything recently? Example: I “learned” once that we can hold 7 items at one time in working memory. I’ve since found out that this is wrong; the actual number is 3-4, which is very important to know if you want to communicate effectively.

Rediscover stuff you’ve forgotten. Re-reading a favorite book that taught you some valuable lessons is like getting back in touch with an old friend; you’ll wish you hadn’t waited so long. While I personally try to keep up with the latest books in fields that interest me, I still find that old books are the best. One of my favorites is Moving Mountains by Henry Boettinger.

Freshen up stale stuff. I apply this one to my training. Some of the examples and anecdotes need to be changed once in a while even though my new students are hearing them for the first time, because it keeps me excited about telling them.

Recharge. Sure, motivational books tell you stuff you already know, but it doesn’t hurt to give yourself a boost once in a while. If you want to try something new, I recommend EDGY Conversations: How Ordinary People Can Achieve Outrageous Successby Dan Waldschmidt.

Learn something new. When you’ve cleared out all the clutter, you’ll have room in your mind for something new. Maybe it’s a practical skill that might take you to the next level in your career, or something less immediately practical but maybe more fulfilling, such as learning a language or taking an online course.

Uncategorized

A Plain English Handbook: Reading Recommendation

By Jack Malcolm / 4.2.2014 / No Comment

Plain English is like common sense: it’s prized but not too common.

When was the last time you listened to a presentation and left wondering what the speaker just said, or scratched your head over a confusing email? Sadly, it seems like clear communication in plain English is a rare commodity these days. That’s a problem in business today because it slows down the exchange of useful information needed to make intelligent decisions. On the other hand, it offers an opportunity for clear speakers to stand out.

In researching for my book on Maximum Credibility, I came across a useful solution to this problem that I would like to tell you about. Surprisingly, it was put out by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and it’s called, A Plain English Handbook: How to Create Clear SEC Disclosure Documents.

Reading annual reports and prospectuses[1] can be like wading into a swamp at night without a map: it’s slow going, and even if you get through to the other side you’re not sure where you’ve been. The net result is that investors can’t make informed investment decisions. So, if someone can make complex financial information easier to understand, there is hope for all of us.

The Handbook does this very well, with clear and simple rules for figuring out what the reader needs to make a good decision, eliminating unnecessary and confusing verbiage, and writing in a “user-friendly” style.

The Handbook says, “A plain English document is easy to read and looks like it’s meant to be read.” I believe you can extend that same idea to speaking: a plain English presentation is easy to understand and is a pleasure to hear. The same rules that apply to writing apply to speaking, so anyone who has to sell ideas can benefit from reading—and practicing—the ideas in A Plain English Handbook.

The Handbook is easy to read, of course, and even better, it’s free. They offer it here as a public service, and you will be doing yourself and your public a favor by reading it, even if only as a reminder. As Warren Buffett says in the introduction: “Write as this handbook instructs you and you will be amazed at how much smarter your readers will think you have become.”

[1] It’s not prospecti, is it?

Questioning skills - Sales

Don’t Avoid the Hard Questions

By Jack Malcolm / 4.1.2014 / No Comment

It’s not really that bad

In a class I ran last week, the participants seemed to be having a harder time than usual asking their customers (actually, their colleagues playing the part of customers in role plays) the hard questions. They would ask one or two questions about the customer’s situation, and then fail to probe when the customer’s answer hinted that things may not be as rosy as they claimed. Words like, “issues, struggles, lack of, etc.” zipped unnoticed over their heads like stealth planes.

Instead, the salespeople would listen intently, maybe jot down a note or two, and then when the customer finished their silent pleas for help, launch into their canned pitch about all their “solutions”.

When I tried to figure out what was going on, one of the students told me that they have been conditioned to accentuate the positive, so it seems like a downer to get the customer talking about the problems in their situations. I replied that if doctors acted that way, no one would ever be cured of anything.

Why do so many sales conversations avoid these areas? I don’t know for sure, but I can speculate. It may be a sense that the customer already knows what he needs, so you sound pushy in bringing it out. It could be a lack of knowledge of the customer’s industry, company, or operations. It might even be impatience to talk about the wonderful slick product you have. But mostly I think it’s the fear of upsetting the customer by bringing out unpleasant topics.

The problem with that, is that status quo is extremely powerful. Customers will never buy except to solve a problem, take advantage of an opportunity, adapt to change or mitigate a risk. And even if those are present in their situation, if they don’t talk about them they may be able to fool themselves that they can put off doing something about them. Meanwhile, the consequences and risks pile up because no one has asked the hard questions.

They can only put off action for so long before eventually the need catches up with them, but by then you probably won’t be there to help. The only person who wins when you steer clear of the hard questions is your competitor.

Success - Uncategorized

Awesome

By Jack Malcolm / 3.31.2014 / No Comment

For the record, in over 400 posts on this blog, I have never used the word awesome.

This past weekend, I attended a swim meet in Miami. Some very dear friends from out of town were here to watch their daughter swim and try to qualify for the US team. It was just like any of the dozens of swim meets I attended in my youth, with swimmers hanging around on the deck with their friends while they waited for their events, coaches dispensing last-minute advice, and parents in the stands with video cameras and heat sheets close at hand.

Just as I remembered from my swimming days, each athlete had the same look of eager determination as they lined up behind the blocks for their event, and as their names were announced for each event, individual burst of cheers would come from each family contingent. During the race, the parents would yell and watch each split closely, and I’m sure the parents’ highs and lows depending on results were more intense than their child’s.

The only difference between this meet and the ones I knew so well was that this meet was the U.S. Paralympics Spring Swimming Nationals. Every single competitor has a physical disability. Some have less obvious disabilities: you might not know the swimmer in lane 5 is blind until you see a helper tap them on the head with a long pole to signal it’s time to turn. You might not know they have cerebral palsy until you see that they can only drag their legs behind them as their powerful arms slice through the water. Some are more obvious: those born without one or more limbs, or those who gave eyes or limbs in service to their country.

Let others use the word awesome to describe the dessert they ate last night. I prefer to ration that word only to describe–to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald–something commensurate with my capacity for wonder. I prefer to use that word to describe the heart of a thirteen-year-old girl with no legs and only one arm competing in the 100 freestyle. I prefer to use that word to describe the parents of those children, who do everything possible to ensure that their kids lead lives defined by their possibilities, not their limitations.

It was an awesome privilege to be in the company of these great athletes.