CHARISMA MODE – Effective Communication Skills in Business

By: Dean Hyers Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Charisma helps us lead, sell, present, gain support, and win people over. How can it not be a plus in business? It most definitely is.

Charisma as Effective Communication Skills in Business

Charisma is more a "mode" than a trait, and part of effective communication skills in business.

Charisma isn’t a trait, so much as it is a mode. Some people are born with a propensity for this mode, and in that way it’s a trait. But anyone can have it.

By anyone, I mean you. And I mean men and women alike. However, this is one of the rare times when I, a sworn servant and protector of Yin virtues, look more towards the masculine role-models to smoke out this elusive and coveted “mode.”

The world seems to agree with that approach. In an attempt to find something to counter it, I googled “charismatic women,”  and got “Learn How To Develop Charisma That Attracts Women.”

To put a fine point on it, I don’t think charisma is a gender thing at all, but I must admit feeling just a little macho when I’m in that mode.

An even rarer thing for me to say: Men are a good example of emotional balance when in “charisma mode,” because they appear to have both yin and yang elements firing at the same time.

I will step into the antiquated gender mindset  (But don’t worry, I won’t stay there long), because the old-school black and white view on genders has something to do with why men are more likely to be considered “charismatic” than women are.

When I was a child, boys and girls more or less were. They existed as authentic beings. Sure, roles really shaped and confined us, but we weren’t defining ourselves in relation to the opposite sex as we would when we hit our teens. During the teen years, we walked through our days in relation to the magnetic push-pull of the genders. And in those years, women were judged more based on what they were, whereas men were judged more by what they did.

I wasn’t particularly charismatic in my teens and twenties, because it seemed to be more about what you were if you were a woman, and what you did if you were a man. I wasn’t much for out-doing a lot of the other boys and later men.

Here’s what I think charisma is:

Charisma is a mix of 5 ingredients:

Confidence

A balance of soft and hard energy

A sense of contained power

A penetrating intensity

An other-centric focus.

Each of the five is completely attainable for either gender using SagePresence methodology. These qualities would benefit any business person when leading, networking, presenting, or selling themselves. I believe that you can work on any of the five individually, and build toward more charisma. Let’s take them one at a time, as a count-down.

5) Other-Centric Focus: Charismatic people focus outward. They seem to be secure enough in themselves and willing to see, study, and scrutinize their environment. They are not stuck on themselves (at least not when they’re being charismatic). Inward-focused people appear “self-absorbed,” like “cool guys” who are too good for everyone else. Charismatic people are interested in others.

My favorite flavor of charisma is kind – powerful, yet humble. It fits in any business setting. It may sound paradoxical, yet if it is, its the paradox that give it such a radiant vibration. Caring, charismatic people watch, sense, and interact with their surroundings.

*Practice Other-Centric Focus Mode as an activity. To achieve this element, simply focus on the people you are talking to.

4) Penetrating Intensity: Some people look at you. Others look right into you. A very charismatic woman comes to my mind. I knew her in college (and others I know have mentioned being caught off-guard by it. She looked right into you with such intensity that you might forget your name. You got 100% of her attention whether you could handle it or not. It was platonic, although one could certainly use it in a sexual way too, which would be a huge mistake in the workplace.

To practice try looking at an object. Just look at it. Then, try intensifying the activity of looking at it. Intensity is hard to explain. It’s like a “contained excitement” that builds. Try to go beyond looking, to really seeing, and then imagine you’re seeing right into it – seeing its essence. It’s like looking down a road anticipating someone who’s about to appear on the horizon.

Then try it with people, and add appreciation to keep it kind and safe.

*Practice Penetrating Intensity Mode by seeing deeper, anticipating and appreciating the essence – first of objects, then people.

3) A Sense of Contained Power: We all have power. Above all, this is a mindset. I’ve gotten a lot of coaching time with people like Lauri Flaquer, Erl Morrell-Stinson, and vicariously through my business role model John Stout, who collectively have helped me to figure out and define my own purpose, which is what I think about to jump-start an internal sense of power.

My “reason” happens to be my commitment to protect others when they feel vulnerable. I mentally “trigger” that, and then I leave it alone. I want to feel power, and then contain it.

This is why muscular people seem so impressive. They have physical power, but they aren’t using it right now. In the same way, I generate a sense of power, and others seem to feel it, at least abstractly.

*Practice Contained Power Mode by envisioning your own internal power like a battery or a glowing light bulb. Sense its energy and contain it, as though building a positive “pressure” inside yourself.

2) A Balance of Hard and Soft Energy: Charismatic people have a Yin/Yang balance. This is why I’m so certain that women can have as much charisma as men. I think it’s just less-recognized as a descriptor to women. Emotion is my favorite energy, and I generate my charismatic mode by mixing a small amount of “joy” with a small amount of “anger.” I am “happy/mad” and that creates a wild vibration. The emotional energy of happy is intrinsically positive. The emotional energy of mad is driving. Together, they are positively assertive.

Yes, I’m literally telling you that when I want to be charismatic, I get mad and happy at once. That’s how I do it. Mad/Happy = Hard/Soft. It’s an inherent polarity and it resonates with a high frequency. Have you ever noticed that charismatic people “smell like opportunity?” They have a devilish kindness. They seem dangerous but you trust them. They have an energized calm. Charisma is that polarized vibration. I do it emotionally.

*Practice Hard/Soft Mode by making a statement with joy. “This is an amazing opportunity… ” Then try it with anger. “This is an amazing opportunity… ” Then see if you can do both at the same time. If this doesn’t make sense, then watch a movie with a sports coach inspiring the team.

1) Confidence: Anyone can be confident, and all of us are at times. Confidence is a mode, and the biggest surprise about confidence is that you don’t actually have to be confident to have it. (Another paradox, I know.)

Redefine confidence as courage. Courage requires fear. It is a “moving forward with fear.” We view courageous people as confident, so your personal doubts fit just fine in that equation.

Confidence has a certainty to it. Pete Machalek says, “I ground my certainty in helping others. I am certain I will help because that is my intention.” There are other things to be certain about, but practice feeling certain about something.

*Practice Confidence Mode by recognizing your courage and how fear is a necessary ingredient. Take pride in taking action instead of beating yourself up for having fear. Also, practice being certain about one specific thing (such as “I am certain I will help others”). Anchor yourself to your certainty, even amidst uncertainty in the environment. YOU are the certainty in the uncertain environment.

Deep stuff. Let’s reduce it – how about to a single sentence.

Charisma is placing a certainty inside, which creates feelings of drive and celebration, internally empowering you, to intensely engage your environment.

Try these thing separately, and eventually together, and Confidence, Hard/Soft Energy, Contained Power, Penetrating Intensity, and Other-Centricity will bring you to the one elusive “mode” admired by all, born into a few, and achievable by anyone – charisma!

21 interesting opinions, add yours

WHY YOUR IMPORTANT POINTS DON’T MATTER – Sales Presentation Skills that Win

By: Dean Hyers Tagged With: , , , ,

My last post (Never Thank Your Audience) really generated some controversy and questions when I set out to demonstrate why thanking your audience shifts your message from “We’re here to give,” to “We’re here to get.”

Selling to Win

When you're selling, it's less about the information and more about your presence

That same controversy was going on the room as we coached our biggest competitive sales presentation win to date. It happened this month, to the tune of nearly $400 million, which was confirmed as a win earlier this week. It was a lot of pressure for everyone, and business development people aren’t always open to learning new tricks when they perceive their future is on the line.

Time was passing by very quickly in the hotel’s conference room. Pete and I were tense inside the pressure, but falling asleep at the same time listening to nine or so presenters, three senior execs, the business development team leader, and several support people, heating up over how to work this point or that point, into a presentation that was overstuffed already.

After the team clearly identified that they had too much information for the time they had, they proceeded to add ten new slides to the deck. Even more frustrating, they specifically stated a preference for a “casual discussion” over a formal presentation, but the notion of audience interaction scared them back to what they were used to. They were shying away, climbing back into their cages because the free world outside the box had too many unknowns.

I poured half a Starbuck’s VIA packet into the weak hotel coffee to rev myself up for pushing them out of the nest.

I told them that covering all of their important points wasn’t critical. For the decision-makers, I said, the interview is less about information, or hearing the right answers. It’s more about experiencing the competing teams and discovering who they want to work with.

It doesn’t matter how much content you get through. What matters is that they see
how much you care, that you know your business, that you like their people,
and you like working with each other.

It was getting scary. One person after another got up to talk about their slide. Nothing was showing collaboration. It was like a variety show, except less interesting, or perhaps a relay race where the clicker was the baton.

Pete and I noticed that we were seeing more of what we wanted when they were arguing about who should say what. It wasn’t what got said, it was the process of figuring it out that really showed what they were like to work with.

I started to notice that they weren’t arguing so much as discussing. The bite in the air was just the pressure getting to everyone. But if you overlooked that, just watching the different team members kicking around an idea – the seniors giving insight from above, and the others sharing a vantage from the trenches – several things became clear. They knew their stuff. They were synthesizing multiple perspectives on the fly. And you could tell they loved their work.

We needed to get that quality into the presentation, while giving them some control and predictability. And we did it in three ways:

1) We built multiple discussion points throughout the presentation. Instead of saying, “Feel free to interrupt us at any time during the presentation,” we had about five predesignated points to ask specific questions to the decision makers, to make them talk to us and give us their perspective. We didn’t ask for a discussion, we forced one.

2) While I would have advocated for ditching the entire PowerPoint, we left the slides the way they were, and started having pairs of people speak to each section instead of one person. And we didn’t allow them to decide who covered what. We made them figure it out in the moment.

By this point, we had an interactive dialogue to kick off each section of the presentation, and we had two presenters tag-teaming each section.

The result of 1 and 2 together is: audience interaction (which gave them permission to actually chime in during the presentation, which they did), and we had team-members building upon each other as they presented. In other words, the sales pitch was an experience of working with the team, and you could see how well they worked together, and how they involved the client.

Engaging the prospect’s participation during the interview,
and showing your own team’s collaboration together,
answers the number one question of an interview:
“What will this team be like to work with?”

3) The final piece we worked on was the message of body language. It’s not so much about what you say, but how you feel when you say it that makes the difference. We worked heavily on “feeling our words.” We wanted people to feel in their hearts the passion they had for what they were saying. SagePresence has a lot of performance methodology around finding our passion under pressure, but the simple answer is to feel your words.

Emotionally experience what you’re saying. This can take some practice. And use appreciation specifically to keep your heart behind the other-minded emphasis of being there to help them with your expertise. I appreciate you, and I feel my words.

Together, those three things are vastly more important than getting through all the points you have to make. Go ahead and make great points. Just don’t sweat the idea of getting all the information out. That’s not what a presentation is for. While you’re sharing important points they may or may not understand, care about, or remember, your best bet is to:

  • Build in points of interaction, so that they will be an active audience instead of a passive “TV-style” audience.
  • Forget the “no more than one hop-on” rule and present in pairs, or more, so the dialogue bounces around between team-members like a hockey game instead of the relay race you normally do.
  • Use your genuine feelings to care about the people you talk to.
  • Don’t worry if the prospect likes you or not. You have to like them, as you feel the words you say and unlock the passion you have for your work.

This is the good fight we fought to help our client win the one job that fulfilled a year of sales goals before the end of March. I heard they’re all taking a week off, and their tentative plan is to double their sales goals for this year, and explore some growth markets that they haven’t had the luxury to go after before now.

Share your thoughts and sales experiences, and I’ll try to respond to everyone who kicks in their insights or questions.

 

16 interesting opinions, add yours

NEVER THANK YOUR AUDIENCE: Competitive Sales Presentation Skills

By: Dean Hyers Tagged With: , , ,

Thanking your audience in any presentation is a bad idea, and a hard one to resist because it’s counter-intuitive.

I just coached a winning sales pitch in the multiple hundred million dollar category. It was a team of professionals in the boardroom of decision-makers. There were oodles of dollars on the table and our client was feeling really fortunate just to be one of the three or so firms competing for this job. They wanted to say, “Thanks for the opportunity to present ourselves for this project.”

And we said, “No.” It was a hard sales presentation skills concept to sell, but it played a role in winning.

They thought our perspective was disrespectful to the client, and a one-eighty from their instincts. So I’m going to distill the forty-minute heated conversation to a few hundred words so you can grasp it now, when you’re not in the hot-seat like they were.

We spent some time talking about who this day was about – the day of the pitch. “It’s about them,” they said, wisely… well, almost wisely.

The wise part was the statement, “It’s about them.” That was spot on. The “almost” part was that they didn’t really mean it. They were there for themselves.

Competitive Sales Presentation Skills

"Thank You" makes selling about you, when it needs to be about them.

When your entire year of sales goals can be achieved in March, you’re sitting pretty – if you land such a big fish.

If you do, you’re set in the first quarter, and the entire rest of the year is gravy. This is a sweet project and you’re going to look great for reeling it in. It probably means a promotion. It certainly means a bonus. And everyone on the team wants to do this work… badly.

So how can this not be about you? It’s psychologically very difficult not to walk in wanting the job. Just like it’d be hard to go to a job interview not wanting the offer. But this is exactly what I’m saying, hard as it may be to grasp.

Don’t go to a sales pitch to get a job!
Go to a sales pitch to help the client make an important decision.

We asked our client a few questions to get them to understand this:

  • “Who has the problem that led to this sales opportunity?” (The prospect does.)
  • “Would this problem have existed for your client regardless of whether or not your company ever existed to serve such needs? (Yes, their problem would exist regardless.)
  • “Does the client have any stakes in the game regarding getting this need met?” (Yes, they do.)
  • “Are the stakes bigger for you, or for them?” (It’s bigger for them. We’re only a portion of the budget, and they face politics, and business issues that hinge on this being successful.)
  • “Would you go out of business without this opportunity?” (No. We have other possibilities.)
  • “Who has invested more at this point in the project? Your prospect, or you?” (The prospect. This affects their whole business. We have 3 weeks in preparing to win the contract.)

If you can get behind the very idea of being there for them instead of yourselves, you can be in an entirely different state of mind. They have the problem, and you are there to help them solve it. That is a better mindset for selling. That’s more like consulting, instead of begging. “Please-please-please-please-please pick me! I’m the best. I’m the BEST!”

The classic sales scenario has the prospect in an “up” position, relative to the suitor for the job, who’s in the “down” position. Consulting puts you at a more equal position with the prospect. “We’re here to help you by sharing our expertise so that your project can succeed.” That’s better for your mindset, and it’s hard to resist if you’re the one choosing.

As far as I know, I’ve never hired a house-painter because I thought he really needed the money. I’ve never hired a lawyer because I thought my case would help his year-end bonus. I never hired a financial adviser because it was a tough economy and my dollars would help him put his daughters through college. I hire people because they can help me and because they seem passionate about overcoming my obstacles with me, and for me, and helping me get to the place I want to go.

Which brings us back to “Thank you.” What does that mean?

Thank you for the opportunity to be one of the firms chosen to interview for this project…

– means –

This is about me possibly getting your money, and I’m grateful because I need it.

I don’t want you to think that I’m only here because I want your money. And I myself don’t want to feel desperate. I want to be here for you, to help you with your challenge, by sharing my expertise.

I go to presentations honored to be a part of this important decision. I go to the presentation excited about how unique, or critical, this project is. I show up passionate about sharing my insights and recommendations so that they can make the best decision for their project, and so they succeed.

At the close, I may “admit” that I really hope to be selected – because I want them to know that I do want the job – however I will definitely stress that this is not what is most important today.

Today is about them getting all the information they need to make a good decision. And I might pledge to continue being available to them to share insight and expertise regardless of how they decide to go on this project.

These things altogether say that I am here for them and want what’s best for them. I may benefit, but I’m here today for them.

How could you not want that if you were the decision-maker?

Don’t thank your audience of decision-makers. Be excited about helping them. Express your honor to be part of their important day, and pledge that you’re there for them regardless. Don’t allow “thank you” to place yourself in the down-state below them, needing them. Instead, your excitement, you’re honor, and you’re desire to help them will level the playing field, and increase your odds of being favored over your competition.

Please share this post with others, and give SagePresence your opinions and experiences in the high-pressures of sales presentations.

41 interesting opinions, add yours

VULNERABILITY IV: Effective Interpersonal Communication Skills to See and Be Seen

By: Dean Hyers Tagged With: , ,

Vulnerability is my “night-vision” for business. With it I can see, while everyone around me bumbles in the dark. Vulnerability is part of my personal brand, through which I can be visible to others who would help me, if I let them.

I have built a career on turning weaknesses into strengths. This post, part of a growing series on vulnerability, is about seeing and being seen. Its predecessors are:

  1. FROM VULNERABILITY TO POSSIBILITY: Communication Advice to Grow Opportunity
  2. THE HIDDEN POWER OF VULNERABILITY: Communication Advice for the Strong!
  3. POWER IN VULNERABILITY III: Tips to Improve Verbal Communication Skills

We all want to be on the radar, to blip in the best possible light, and ping with the best possible tone.

Pete Machalek and I work continuously to hone our personal brand, along with the SagePresence brand with Lauri Flaquer of Saltar Solutions. And we blast our brand outward with the help of Robert Dempsey of the Dempsey Marketing Group. Obviously we care about being seen, and viewed the right way.

How does vulnerability fit into this equation? It could sound like the very idea of being vulnerable represents the opposite of making the impression you want to make.

Effective Interpersonal Communication Skills

Vulnerability can be part of effective interpersonal communication skills, allowing you to read others better, to present yourself with humility, and to gain assistance.

Let’s first get on the same playing field, drop the black and white and get grey. The skills we associate with progress, results, and winning sometimes take us where we want to go, and other times they don’t. Even when we consistently do the “powerful things,” we go up, we go down, and we plateau.

When it comes to effective interpersonal skills, I see it more like Rock/Paper/Scissors, where skills and aptitudes sometimes win, sometimes lose, but usually move the ball in some way.

Rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, paper beats rock.
So winning is carrying a rock, a piece of paper, and a pair of scissors.

I think of vulnerability like I do “paper” in that game. I can wrap a rock with paper, even though it’s delicate, and vulnerable to being cut. The more vulnerability I have, the bigger the rock I can take on.

Today, most of my strengths are the direct result of weakness. Paralyzing fear and self-doubt propelled me to become an international speaker and coach multimillion dollar sales pitches. My introversion led me to an extroverted lifestyle where I meet hundreds of people every week! I was a hopelessly lonely teen, which directly fueled my search for a wife and companion, with whom I’ve now enjoyed more than half my life. The relationship between my strengths and my weaknesses is quite evident. So how do we leverage that in terms of interpersonal skills?

Vulnerability and Reading Others

As I studied my own vulnerabilities, I’ve discovered this thing I call “night-vision,” and it’s a subset of emotional intelligence. One of my coaches, Cheryl Alexander, helped me identify this after administering an emotional quotient assessment as part of her coaching. In that test, I had an unusual result in regards to my access to emotions. The test showed that while my relationship to happy and angry were normal, my sensitivity to sadness was off the charts!

I thought that strange, given I’m a pretty happy person. Cheryl explained that it didn’t make me a sad person. It meant that I had nearly unobstructed access to the emotion of sadness – extremely uncommon for men. While that may sound like a vulnerability, I was using it as a strength.

“My uncommonly high sensitivity to sadness became my night-vision.”

I gradually realized that the ability to perceive sadness would be my ticket to read situations and strategize actions. It hit me during a business meeting when I was trying to sell an idea for a corporate film. Nobody on the client side thought the main decision-maker could be persuaded towards such a thing, and a “No” vote here would kill our project.

In the meeting, as people talked, I began to notice their feelings – I could subtly feel them, like you might when you empathize with someone. I noticed things like:

  • Whenever Judy talked about how closely their department’s spending was being watched, it disheartened Tom. (Disheartened is a sad feeling.)
  • Each time Tom referenced a failed project from a few years back, a woman named Susan got worried, and hesitated from contributing.
  • As the top dog in the room sternly fired challenging questions at people, all but two of the staff experienced a fear reaction to her.

This is not an exact science, but it was apparent to me who was scared of whom, who was at wit’s end, who could hold their own, and whose boots needed licking. Instantly, I knew what to do. I affirmed the weakest person (the one with the most sadness), I shared enthusiasm with the person who was on the brink of throwing in the towel, I flatly delivered facts to the ones with the least emotion, and I matched the key decision-maker’s sternness as I spoke to the items she cared about most.

I had a check for $50,000 later that afternoon, and everyone else in the room got what they wanted too. My contact within the company said, “How did you navigate that room? None of us had the slightest idea how to handle that.”

“I pay attention to people’s vulnerability to navigate conversations.”

Vulnerability and Winning Allies

Surprisingly, I incorporate vulnerability in my personal brand. This tends to run counterintuitively to the idea of building personal power, but it’s not, for several good reasons:

  1. Sharing your own vulnerability shows humility. We all have our weaker side, and sharing it counters arrogance.
  2. Moving up is seldom accomplished without the help of others. But if you don’t show your vulnerable side, you’re sending a clear message that you don’t need any help, so it won’t come.
  3. People want to help others, and feel good when they’ve lifted someone up. If you never show your vulnerability, then you don’t represent an opportunity for anyone else to get the “having helped” feeling. You can make someone else feel important by gracing them with an opportunity to empathize with you and show you their support.
  4. Vulnerability appeals to the protective instincts of people you are close to. You won’t get any “air-cover” if you don’t appear to be in any danger.
  5. Vulnerability makes you more human, and easier to relate to. It tends to deepen relationships.

Just this week, we are coaching a woman who is performing phenomenally well, but she works in a company where you can only move upward in your career if someone above is willing to advocate for you. Despite years of over-achievement and high performance, this woman could not understand why she didn’t have anyone fighting for her promotion. We believe that it’s because she never shows vulnerability, so there’s no signal going out to the protectors and advocates that she has any need to be helped at all.

We convinced her to show some vulnerability and ask for help, and within a day, people above her who have enjoyed her productivity banded together to offer support, previously unaware that she had needed any help. It was a classic case of “Women Don’t Ask,” and she was afraid to make herself vulnerable, but she did it and it paid off.

To me, vulnerability is one of the best kept secrets in achieving personal power. Pay attention to vulnerability around you and you’ll see in the dark while others bumble like the seven blind men over the elephant in the room. Share your own vulnerability and you will be able to be bold without arrogance, allowing others to see you, relate to you, and offer you help along your own journey.

Some quick tips to help you receive vulnerability’s benefits:

  1. When showing your own vulnerability, create a “strength sandwich.” Show strength first, share your vulnerability second, and return again to show strength after. By strength, I mean either a confident, certain, or assertive feeling, or powerful statements to the same affect.
  2. When you sense vulnerability in others, always support them with empathy, and never make someone else regret having shared their fragile side with you.
  3. Don’t start a relationship on your vulnerability. Whenever possible, start on strength, and later share your more fragile side from within that relationship.

See in the dark, and share your darkness with others, in between expressions of strength.

This post series will continue.

 

13 interesting opinions, add yours

POWER IN VULNERABILITY III: Tips to Improve Verbal Communication Skills

By: Dean Hyers Tagged With: , ,

It looks like this series on vulnerability is expanding. It started with a post about nurturing vulnerable ideas and human resources. It expanded with a look at the vulnerable side of strong people and established ideas. Now we’re going to turn an eye toward technique, and find what it takes to master the balance of being strong and being vulnerable, keeping an eye on why we’d even want to be vulnerable at all. This may take a few posts.

It was a rough week in the life of a sworn protector of vulnerability in the working professionals I serve. I took a loss, with someone I’d sworn to protect. I told them it would be okay, and for them it wasn’t.

Improve Verbal Communication Skills

Emotions can make us feel vulnerable, but without them we can't inspire others to feel what we're saying. Learning to tolerate vulnerability can improve verbal communication skills.

The scenario was an acceptance speech. It could have been just another thank you, another hand shake. I could have taken the easy route and given a man a sure thing, and nobody would have noticed. But I didn’t want “nobody to notice.” I saw he really cared about the new role he was accepting, and he needed to inspire others to care like he did. So I cultured his vulnerability so he would be more able to feel.

Together with Pete, we worked his ability to tap emotions. We helped him to feel his words. We guided him to share his authentic self. “I can get a little choked up over this subject. I wouldn’t want that to happen on stage,” he innocently said.

I challenged him on that. “You’d be lucky to have that happen. We’re head and heart machines. You can’t inspire if you don’t feel, and you can’t feel without making yourself a little vulnerable.” He asked, “But what if I get stuck there?” And I told him, “You won’t. People are far more likely to feel nothing than they are to get swept away by unstoppable emotions. Open yourself up to feel and hope they come.”

Well, they did come. Emotions. And he got choked up in front of a room full of men. And he got kind of stuck there. It was probably a second or two, but for him it felt like an hour. He said he felt stupid. He felt weak. And he wished he’d never allowed me to convince him to let the emotions into the equation.

I want to first voice my empathy for that situation. It sucks to feel weak, particularly as a man before men. This was a very vulnerable moment and the preparation we gave was inadequate, and I’m truly sorry about it.

What I’m not sorry about was getting him in touch with his emotions. What I wish is that the prep for dealing with it would have been more complete. The jury may be out on how the audience feels about seeing someone care so much that they got choked up. Normally, this is a best case outcome.

The reason it’s such a desirable outcome (to care enough to get “verklempt”) is that feelings are contagious, so when you care that much, your audience suddenly cares that much too. Selling an idea is no different than selling a car – your decision not to buy in is intellectual, while your decision to buy is emotional. So the safe bet, the comfortably numb option, can’t influence anyone to buy into your call to action.

You have to feel to get results.

Inspiration in speaking is a very straight-forward sequence. Thoughts trigger feelings, feelings drive body language, and body language viewed by an audience triggers feelings for them, which in turn changes their thoughts… from thinking about action to taking action or offering support.

In order to inspire, you have to feel, and in order to feel you have to accept some vulnerability. On stage, especially for men, that particular feeling can create a lot of self-questioning. So here are three ideas to improve verbal communication skills when you find yourself having an “emotional seizure.” The scenario is, you’ve opened yourself up to feeling your words, and to your surprise, you actually felt something, and you got kind of “stuck” in the emotion.

1) Stop for a second. Give yourself a moment before continuing your talk, and emotion should drop down a notch.

2) Take pride in having genuinely shared how much you care. Be proud that you’ve gone out on a limb for the chance to inspire someone. If you’re a man, you’ve just differentiated yourself from other men.

3) Pursue a different emotion. Either appreciate your audience, enjoy an aspect of your message, or get serious about the importance of your message. Changing your emotion takes you beyond the emotion that hung you up.

Most likely, my client got hung up because feeling stupid pulled his own attention back in on himself.  This is something appreciation can correct for, because you can’t really focus on yourself if you’re appreciating your audience. In reality, this probably wasn’t a disaster, but the way he responded to it might have been.

I actively pursue this state where my emotions (happy, sad, mad, intense, appreciative, assertive, empathetic, and others) cascade and kind of crumble me temporarily. When it happens, I’m pumped about it, so my response to the short “emotional seizure” is really fired up. I rise out of the moment with super-confidence and it shows how strong I am – strong enough to walk the emotional “hot coals” for my audiences.

What really saddens me is that I was so proud of my client for achieving the emotionally genuine goal, but he wasn’t, and I think that could be the last time he ever shares his true colors as a communicator. I hope I’m wrong because I was trying to culture the vulnerability, not sterilize it. Sterile is a plus in surgery, but it’s a minus in the Olympics and on the stage.

I think what he did was courageous, and almost certainly “increased his stock” in the eyes of the audience, even if it made him feel stupid.

The real reason that a choked-up moment might equate to a presentation disaster, is because self-doubt and fear set in as a result, and everything thereafter became awkward and hesitant.

If a delicate moment were to happen, and after a pause, the speaker moved past that feeling onto other feelings (like happy, or serious), then clearly the vulnerable moment wouldn’t have defeated the presenter. Therefore the fragile moment would speak to strength, not weakness. Feel the vulnerable feeling, then move on to something stronger. Balance soft emotions with sturdy ones. Soften overconfidence or arrogance with humility and vulnerability.

Being soft isn’t weak. It’s only weak if you don’t also show strength as well.

When I get hit with an emotion, I’m really excited about it. I enjoy absolute certainty that I am going to help my audience by sharing my fragile side, from which I drive powerfully forward with high confidence that I will make more impact.

I know I’ll inspire someone to care like I do for going to an emotional place, and I’m strong enough that I don’t feel bad if I make someone uncomfortable. That’s part of my confidence – that I can go there and be more okay with wet eyes and a crackly voice. I just choke my way through it and keep going. Or I stop for a second, feel proud, pick a different emotion (either warming with appreciation, brightening with joy, or getting steely serious), and continue talking.

When an emotional speech is over, people regularly say, “I appreciate your genuineness and conviction. I would never have had the confidence to do that.” My certainty matches my softness with strength.

Ease yourself into sharing vulnerably. Take smaller steps. Test it in different situations, and perhaps don’t choose the most important moment to be your first attempt to be sincere with the more fragile feelings in your communication. I’m going to continue this series with a deeper response to a question raised by one of our readers, who commented that “once you show a bit of vulnerability, they come in for your throat.” Watch for it.

 

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