Communication ability is the most critical skill needed to stay competitive in your career. My friend and the founder of Indezine, Geetesh Bajaj and I start off the New Year with a conversation about The Firestarter Experience, an innovative program that will jumpstart your communication and presentation skills.
From: HumanResourcesMBA.org
Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone
An idea is only as good as its pitchman and Steve Jobs was a master. The key to his presentation success? Practice. Jobs spent 10 hours rehearsing for his major keynotes. This clip of Jobs announcing the launch of the iPhone is a classic business presentation case study. It brings into sharp relief: you present what you practice.
Most of my clients strive for that “I have a dream” communications moment that cements their reputation as a leader. The reality is that leadership reputations are more often made by effectively managing the sensitive communications that challenge us in our daily exchanges: The employee whose personal life is impacting his performance, the ongoing disagreements on the home front, a child’s newfound fashion sense.
Drama queens may draw all the attention, but the person with the most persuasive communications skills makes the biggest impact and leaves the best impression, and this is how reputations are made.
The most powerful starting point for a sensitive conversation is to show up fully present in mind, body and spirit. Like most profound truths in life, it is simple but not easy.
Presence is a state of alert awareness that sets the stage for poise and effectiveness. Master each of these four components of presence and you will make a big step toward developing the skills you need to initiate and manage sensitive conversations.
1. Start with beginner’s mind. In the beginner’s mind there are many options; in the expert’s mind there are few. Approach your sensitive situation with an open mind. The challenge here: it requires you to leave the past behind. The opportunity: you will make room for this newborn moment – the present — in which anything can happen.
2. Listen with your heart. Empathy is the ability to identify with or to be sensitive to another person’s emotions and thoughts. Empathy is not synonymous with sympathy, nor does it imply that you agree with the other person. Empathy is a function of your heart’s intuition and perception. It creates a clear and open channel for you to listen for and to hear the underlying needs the other person is expressing.
3. Transform your inner voice. Thoughts and feelings drive behavior and universally a handful of thoughts and feelings are responsible for driving most of human behavior. Number one on the list: I’m right, you’re wrong. Monitor your inner voice, look at other perspectives and choose as your default position positive, constructive thoughts.
4. Manage your emotions. Emotion can be a powerful tool when deployed skillfully. For most of us, anxiety and fear overwhelm our ability to think clearly and shift perspective at critical moments. A pumping heart and shortness of breath is our body’s way of signaling its anxiety. Meditation and breathing practices help to derail these physical signs of stress.
Among his many accomplishments as a writer, Aaron Sorkin now has an Academy Award for the screenplay “The Social Network”, a fictionalized movie about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. “The Social Network” brings into sharp relief the market forces that are driving innovations in business and in business communication — in both form and function.
Sorkin’s social network story tells a bigger-than-life creation myth. Facebook was The Big Bang of social networking. It created an entirely new digital world and a reordered the social contract. Every creation myth needs a bad guy, too. The Zuckerberg character that sprung from Sorkin’s imagination is a young man who lost control of his own narrative.
Effective leaders know that the best stories win — people’s hearts, minds and commitment. “The Social Network” is a cautionary tale for a new generation of executives who recognize the need for a compelling narrative and the skills to communicate it across multiple media channels – live and in person, by text, audio, video and interactive social networking dialogue.
You, too, can take an idea from concept to story by following a logical and methodical process:
1. Start with SOCO. To make an impact, make a point: a single, overriding communications objective. Build your story, develop your story and resolve your story around a SOCO.
2. Build your story on a classic foundation. It was true in ancient Greece and it’s true today: Persuasion balances logos, ethos and pathos.
- Logos/logic: your story must be logical and make sense.
- Ethos/credibility: the storyteller must be trustworthy and credible.
- Pathos/emotional: the story must stir people’s emotions and compel them to listen.
3. Follow the Rule of Three. Why is the three pairing so pervasive in communication? Pattern recognition. Design the progression of your story using the rule of three:
- Your story needs a beginning, middle and end
- Your story should create tension, build tension and resolve tension
- To increase audience retention, recognize, layer and repeat.
4. Every story needs a good guy and a bad guy. Certain types of stories and their archetypal characters have endured to tell universal truths, to explain how the world works and to reveal us to ourselves. Archetypal heroes represent social values and the villains represent a problem or a set of problems. Three well known archetypes lend themselves to business stories:
- The Classic Hero’s SOCO: Save the world. The Hero meets his destiny. Think Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker.
- The Rebel’s SOCO: Change the world. The Rebel rejects the status quo. Think Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg.
- The Detective’s SOCO: Make your life better. The Detective thinks outside the box to find the solution to thorny problems.Think Google.
5. If you must use PowerPoint, use it to enhance storytelling. Storytelling is used to help an audience process information, come to a conclusion or to make a decision. Richard E. Mayer, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of California, conducts research around educational psychology.
- Multimedia principle: people learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.
- Coherence principle: people learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included.
- Contiguity principle: people learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented at the same time or next to each other on the screen.
- Modality principle: people learn better from animation with spoken text than animation with printed text.
- Signaling principle: people learn better when the material is organized with clear outlines.
Last week I was at a Fortune 50 company working with a group of research and development scientists on authenticity, leadership and communication skills. Navigating a diverse, global multi-stakeholder marketplace is driving a new appreciation for the most basic form of human communication: storytelling.
A new generation of business leaders understands that to build trust and effectively lead, the best stories win — people’s hearts, minds and commitment.
Stories bridge cultures, gender, age and industries. Storytelling is highly effective when your goal is to:
- Present your vision. A story can create a vision of the future, articulate values and build trust.
- Help people make a choice. A story can guide your audience through a decision making process.
- Make abstract ideas a reality. Stories simplify scientific and technical information so that the audience can imagine it as a reality.
2. To leverage the power of storytelling, it helps to understand:
A good story makes meaning by tapping into universal human experiences. Stories bring abstract ideas to life. Facts don’t speak for themselves, they an interpreter – a storyteller — to place them in context, as this example illustrates.
Facts: The Queen died. The King died a week later.
Story: The Queen died and a week later the King died from a broken heart.
The pain of heartbreak and loss is universal. The emotional power of the King’s grief translates across culture, gender and age.
3. Emotion is the gatekeeper of the intellect. Emotions filter the human experience, shaping our beliefs and behavior. A good story speaks to what the audience emotionally needs or values. Marketers have long known that people buy on emotion and justify with intellect.
Stories create enduring memories. The audience may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.
More than sentiment underlies the grip of emotion. Emotions are a complete mind-body event, produced by a secret sauce of hormones, peptides and proteins that creates a chemical imprint on your brain, forming a lasting memory. Strong emotions create vivid memories.
Many thanks to my friend Geetesh Bajaj, one of the world’s leading authorities on Power Point, for running this post on his international blog, Indezine.
At the recent TED event Dan Pink draws from his new book, “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us,” to discuss how three critical drivers of personal behavior create engaged employees:
- Autonomy – the urge to direct our own lives.
- Mastery – the desire to get better and better at something that matters.
- Purpose – the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.
The ever-engaging Pink draws from the latest behavioral science to argue this: To drive collaboration, innovation and productivity, modern management will need to shift its paradigm and policies about talent management and motivation.
An image really is worth a thousand words. This is what brain research has to say about developing an effective Power Point presentation:
- Our brains thrive on novelty and excitement, which explains why the average adult has the attention span of a toddler. To keep your audience engaged, keep your presentations brief and interactive.
- Vision trumps all other senses. All those words you insist must go on each slide is the surest way to put your audience to sleep. If you want your audience to hear your message and remember it an hour later use a single, simple and visually exciting image to illustrate your point.
- Stories keep people engaged; facts put them to sleep. Use visuals to metaphorically tell your story.
In this week’s NYT’s Sunday Business Corner Office column, cosmetics maven Bobbi Brown provides insights in how to work for and communicate with a highly conceptual CEO.
It helps to know that Brown’s rise to global beauty brand started only 20 years ago with one simple lipstick in a natural but elegant shade of pinky/brown. Today, Bobbi Brown Cosmetics is owned by beauty industry giant Estee Lauder and Brown remains at the helm as creative director and CEO.
- Given that instinct is so much a part of creative expression, it’s no surprise that Brown trusts her gut in sizing up people. “I know within two or three minutes if I like someone. If I find them easy to talk to and open, then I’ll ask them to walk me through their resume.”
- “Creative people are not like other people. Ask any other creative CEO,” says Brown. Communicating without using words is maddening to left-brain thinkers. Conceptual thinkers, on the other hand, are skilled in the art of nuance and comfortable with ambiguity.
No one in the business world wants to read “War and Peace”, says Guy Kawasaki in this week’s Corner Office column from the New York Times. The legendary start-up guru values concise communication, which is the complete opposite of what b-school teaches. His pithy points, concisely:
- Learn how to communicate in five-sentence emails.
- Ditto, Power Point decks (10/20/30 rule).
- Psychology would have better prepared him for the real world of management.
It takes a lot of imagination to translate financial documents into intelligible earnings reports and a prospectus into a CEO’s inspiring vision of the future. It also takes the patience of Job to sort through source material prepared by lawyers and accountants.
Simplicity evangelist Alan Siegal is my new guru. The founder of Siegal+Gale, an innovative branding firm, Siegel wants to put plain English into legal documents. The IRS hired him, which probably explains why I breezed through my tax forms this year.
Siegal proposes making it a national priority to simplify government and business documents as a means to achieving:
- Clarity
- Transparency
- Empathy
">Build some humanity into communication.
Microsoft PowerPoint. TM.
Power Point is the high fructose corn syrup of business communications. Like the controversial sweetener, PPT is ubiquitous and adds weight to your business communications. Not the lean muscle of gravitas, but the flab of too much information.
Everyone has an opinion about PPT: CEOs frown on PPT-assisted communications. Neuroscientists have a say about your brain on PPT. Late-night comedy clubs comedians skewer it.
Even the U.S. military has a point of view about PPT: “It makes us stupid.”
As Garr Reynolds at PresentationZen says, “Blame the fool, not the tool.”
Presentations are high-impact communication opportunities. Advances in digital design combined with narrative storytelling have created game-changing tools for business communicators.
Watch this space for tips to get you speaking with power and persuasion.
The backlash against the PowerPoint culture reached a crescendo yesterday. The New York Times reported that despite their dependence on PPT as a communication vehicle, U.S. military commanders, “have serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making.”
I agree that PPT is the single biggest barrier to effective business communication. PPT is great for organizing data, but data alone doesn’t provide insight. Slides filled with data and bullet points disconnect the speaker from the audience. As Star Wars director George Lucas once said, “a special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.”
PPT is a great tool, but it’s not the lead actor in a presentation. You – the presenter – are the main event.
Over the next few days, I will be writing about my five-point process for presentation development. This process can be applied to any extended communication format where the objective is persuasion.
In the beginner's mind there are many options. In the expert's mind there are few. Shunryo Suzuki
Humans are creatures of habit. The problem with habit is that we stop thinking about our behavior and stop noticing our environment. Habit narrows our field of vision and limits what we believe about possibilities. A core concept in Buddhist thought, Beginner’s Mind is a mindset that is continually open to seeing and learning something new in every experience, particularly familiar experiences.
Regardless of how many presentations or PPT decks you’ve created, leave them all behind. Engaging your beginner’s mind cultivates a fresh perspective of what might be familiar material.
Effective communication draws from a wide range of sources that inform presentation development. Cognitive psychology and neuroscience are making contributions to our understanding of how humans process information. Business communicators are engaged in a new appreciation for the power of storytelling. And polished presentation delivery is expected.
Over the next week, I will expand on my five-point process for presentation development:
1. Develop in analog. The return of pen and paper.
2. Start with the end in mind. Creating context and continuity.
3. Analyze your audience. A lesson in empathy.
4. What’s your story? Draw from mythology to develop imaginative content and a logical structure.
5. Slide graphics. Banish bullet points.
6. Bonus. Effective charts and graphs.
How do the best presenters create raving fans? What is their secret?
There is one, and only one, objective of a presentation: to connect with your audience.
Connecting with people is a whole body experience, beginning with stirring emotion. Emotions are the gatekeepers of the human intellect. No connection. No communication.
U2 frontman Bono accepting the NAACP Chairman's Award 2007
U2 frontman Bono has created raving fans around the world, not only for his music, but also his efforts to fight AIDS in Africa. In his speech accepting the NAACP 2007 Chairman’s Award, Bono connects, engages and inspires his audience.
This is your mantra: ”My goal is to connect, engage and inspire.”
One more time. My goal is to connect, engage and inspire.
Speaking with Power and Persuasion. TM
Our deepest fear is of the unknown.
For a business communicator there is no greater abyss than a blank PPT document staring out from a computer screen.
Avoid this existential crisis by starting your presentation development in analog.
Remember pen and paper? Flip chart and Sharpie? Whiteboard and erasable marker? An office wall covered with a rainbow of Post-It notes?
A mind map is an efficient tool for presentation development. It is a visual image that organizes your thinking along the Speaking with Power and Persuasion six-point process: Objective, theme, audience, story, graphics, data and delivery. Over the next few days, we will expand each point on the wheel, moving from presentation concept, to outline to first draft.
In the interests of full disclosure, I am a theme junkie. Every memo, consulting document, white paper and love letter to my husband is framed by a theme. Your presentation needs a theme, too. A theme signals what’s ahead so that your audience can get into the right frame of mind. A theme creates context and continuity and will keep your presentation focused. An effective theme is timeless and speaks to common and universal experiences. A great theme is simple and memorable.
A memorable theme
A theme is more than a headline because it must support the load of your entire presentation. Your theme is The Big Idea. It is a SOCO – single, overriding communications objective. It’s your presentation’s brand statement.
For theme inspiration spend some time on TED (TED: Ideas Worth Spreading) where presentations are organized by theme: jaw dropping, inspiring, entertaining, courageous, beautiful, persuasive, funny, informative, fascinating and ingenious.
Effective communicators empathize with their audience and respond to their needs. This sentence alone raises hackles in business circles with its touchy, feely, pop psychology feel. Yet, empathy is the critical ingredient in creating the conditions for effective communication.
Empathy is no more complicated than the ability to walk in the other guy’s shoes– especially if you wish they were behaving differently.
Justified is set to great music, from bluegrass to hip hop. One of my favorite blues artists, Otis Taylor, performs 'Ten Million Slaves' in the episode 'Blowback.' Link to the music here.
This principle was brought into sharp relief on the FX television show “Justified,” a stylish adaptation of a novella by best- selling crime writer Elmore Leonard. The show takes place in eastern Kentucky and features Deputy U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens. Givens sports a 10-gallon hat, a wry and weary world view and when necessary, a streak of violence.When he does pull his sidearm, Givens aims to kill.
For all his gun shooting, Givens is a student of human nature and can be deeply empathetic, a trait he puts on full display in the recent episode “Blowback.”
Cooling his heels in the U.S. Marshall’s jail while awaiting sentencing, a murderous inmate breaks free and takes hostages. Though he’s been given the order ‘shoot to kill,’ Marshall Givens scrambles to defuse the situation through negotiation. The inmate, Cal Wallace, has no demands. He is serving four life sentences and knows what his future looks like.
Givens keeps Wallace talking, and it doesn’t take long before he vents his rage about the prison guards, whose humiliating treatment “ … turns men into animals.’
Time is running out and the SWAT team is itching to move in. Wallace talks about fried chicken and Givens sends out for a fried chicken dinner, reasoning he can create a chance for Wallace to save face and surrender. Givens promises to sit down with Wallace over a fried chicken dinner every night for the rest of his three-day stay in the U.S. Marshall’s office. Givens promises they will dine like civilized people.
Because this is what Wallace needs. To be treated like a civilized person, not an animal.
Wallace surrenders and the crisis ends without gunfire.
This powerful dramatization of empathy underscores the universal human need to be known, to be understood, and to be seen.
If you are making a presentation, clearly you have something you want to say. That’s great, because passion is the first step on the road to an effective presentation.
If you are aching to be heard, you must say something remarkable. We live in a sea of sameness, which is safe. Remarkable is risky.
Take a risk. Stand out.
To get yourself into the right frame of mind, watch Seth Godin’s TED talk about how ideas spread.
Imagination . . . is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared. Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places. J.K. Rowling Commencement, June 2008 Harvard University
If you are preparing a presentation, empathy is the vehicle for understanding your audience. It’s not mind-reading, but a process where you recognize, interpret and respond appropriately to another person’s emotions and the thoughts or beliefs these emotions can produce.
Use your imagination, your instincts and your best self to think through:
Who are they? Imagine what a day in the life of your audience looks like. Imagine what their day feels like. Tap into the emotional tone of their day. Harried and frustrating? Fast-paced or sleepy?
Why are they attending your presentation? Everyone has an unmet need, problem to be solved or a desire to be fulfilled. Why did they come to hear you? What do they expect from you?
How is your presentation relevant to the audience? The minute you open your mouth to speak, the audience is asking: So what? Who cares? What’s in it for me?
What do you want from the audience? Do you want them to change something — their thinking, their behavior, or their actions. Do you want them to do something – buy your product, vote, or contribute to your cause. It’s critical to know what you want from your audience so that your ‘call to action’ is clear and compelling.
Do you understand why they may resist you? No solution is perfect and some trade-offs are more acceptable than others. Think through how the audience views the pros and cons, the trade-offs and the benefits you offer. Consider the emotion that underlies their belief system and speak to it. This is the key to overcoming objections. Have you ever noticed that the most stubborn people are those who don’t feel understood by anyone? Demonstrate that you understand them and their resistance will soften.
Stories carry the emotional hooks that are necessary to engage, inspire and motivate your audience.
Emotions or feelings are a complete mind-body event. Your body produces a secret sauce of hormones, peptides and proteins that creates a chemical imprint on your brain, forming a lasting memory. What you remember later about an event is largely influenced by the feeling or the emotional memory it created.
Strong emotions create vivid memories. This explains why we remember heartache as painful, failure as humiliation, anger as heat in the belly and success as excitement. Great speakers relive stories.
Effective communicators understand the power of emotional associations to inspire, engage and motivate their audience. Take this simple example:
Example One: The Queen died. The King died a week later.
Example Two: The Queen died and a week later the King died from a broken heart.
Which version of this story brings a tear to your eye?
Throughout humanhood certain types of stories have endured to tell universal truths, to explain how the world works and to reveal us to ourselves. Cultures may differ in their specific mythologies but the underlying truths are the same. Modeling your presentation on a well known myth or archetypal character stimulates recognition and creates a common ground between you and the audience.
Archetypal characters surround us in film, books, television, music, theatre, dance, and art. Three well known archetypes lend themselves to business communications: The Hero, The Rebel and The Detective. Apply the Rule of Three to theme, character/plot and structure and you have an imaginative story in a logical structure.
The Hero
Theme: Save the World.
Character/Plot:
1. Create tension: The Hero is called to a quest or a challenge.
2. Build tension: The Hero must make a choice: to follow his destiny or to fail. His story answers the first universal question: Who am I?
3. Release tension: The Hero meets his destiny by going to battle for an honorable cause.
Audience payoff: The Hero saves the world
(Hint: Think Steve Jobs)
The Rebel
Theme: Change the World.
Character/Plot:
1. Create tension: The Rebel rejects the status quo.
2. Build tension: The Rebel reveals himself to be a visionary who drives us into the future.
3. Release tension: The Rebel’s work transforms the world.
Audience payoff: The world is a better place
(Hint: Think Bono)
The Detective
Theme: Solves a Problem
Character/Plot:
1. Create tension: The Detective sees a puzzling problem that has defied a solution.
2. Build tension: The Detective sets out on a journey of discovery, seeking to simplify the complex.
3. Release tension: Creative thinking leads to an innovative solution.
Audience payoff: Makes your life easier.
(Hint: Think Phil Knight and Nike)
An emotional hook that speaks to the audience gets their attention. To keep their attention you need a logical structure. Applying the Rule of Three, break down your presentation into three acts: recognition, repetition and layering. The layering process is critical to long term retention.
Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em — summarize your presentation — emphasizing your theme/objective
Repetition
Each slide is a mini chapter — no more than three points per slide — audiences retain this much and no more
Layering
Make it interesting so the audience can begin to make associations — imagine a story arc — create tension, build tension, release tension
Repetition
Tell ‘em what you told ‘em - restate your theme/objective
Layering
Memorable ending — the audience expects a pay off
Anthony Robbins, a neurolinguist master, gives a riveting presentation at TED that vividly illustrates this three-part storytelling structure.
A horse designed by committee.
In contemporary business settings, PowerPoint presentations have become much like the camel: a horse designed by committee.
PowerPoint was created to support the speaker with supplemental graphics and visual information. The unintended consequence: PowerPoint does double-duty as a handout or a leave-behind document.
Your PowerPoint presentation has only one job: to support you in connecting, engaging and inspiring your audience. It does this by transforming information into visual stories.
To leverage this power, it helps to understand how people process information. Cognitive science has given us a pretty good idea about how humans process information and how this applies to presentation development.
1. The most effective presentations combine storytelling with visual images. Use multi-media – carefully. Music sets a mood and video trips the brain’s novelty-seeking senses.
2. Limit your ideas to one main idea per slide, supported by a maximum of three proof points. Balance emotion with logic by using metaphors, anecdotes and thought-provoking questions.
3. Keep it simple. Slides that are riddled with bullets and burdened by complex charts overload people’s cognitive systems. The less clutter, the more effective.
4. Effective design gives your words meaning and clarity. Use bold graphic images to create visual metaphors. Use high quality graphics and photographs to esthetically engage your audience.
5. If it takes longer than three seconds to understand a chart or graph, revise it!
6. Use charts and graphs strategically:
- If the intent is to minimize the difference between pieces of information, use a table. If the intent is to illustrate the difference between pieces of information, use a chart.
- Pie charts illustrate relationships by percentages.
- Vertical bar charts show changes in quantity over time.
- Horizontal bar charts compare quantities.
- Line charts demonstrate trends.
My mission is to liberate everyone, everywhere from presentation coma.
Not many investors would bet against Warren Buffet — with good reason. Buffet’s ability to spot long term value has earned him great wealth and sincere admiration in equal measure. He put his legendary reputation on the line in a televised Town Hall meeting with MBA students at his alma mater, Columbia Business School.
During Q&A, a sharp second-year student asked ” . . . what did your Columbia MBA not prepare you for?”
Confessing that he took a Dale Carnegie course after graduating from Columbia, the Oracle of Omaha used an investment calculation to make his point: ”Right now, I would pay $100,000 for 10% of the future earnings of any of you. You could improve your value by XX% just in terms of learning communication skills. “
Maryellen Thielen, 2010-2011 President, NIRI-Chicago
A spirited crowd gathered on the ROOF, a swanky watering hole atop theWit Hotel, to fete Maryellen Thielen, incoming president of the NIRI-Chicago chapter, and to thank Patti Paul, outgoing president.
What a difference a day makes.
From the 27th floor rooftop we enjoyed movie-set ambience created by the sharp relief of shiny steel and glass buildings against a crisp blue sky and golden light reflecting off the iconic Carbon and Carbide building. Only 24 hours earlier these same skies were dark with violent storms that triggered tornado warning sirens in Chicago’s Loop, sending afternoon commuters running for shelter from the pelting rain.
Cocktail chatter suggests the economy is looking up. It was good to see new faces and old friends. Agency heads reported that business has stabilized and many in the crowd were celebrating new jobs.
The changing role of investor relations over the last decade has eaten into NIRI’s membership. Maryellen, senior manager of financial communications at Allstate, says she will focus on reinvigorating membership and continuing NIRI-Chicago’s longstanding reputation for excellence in programming. A highly regarded, award-winning corporate communicator and longstanding member of the NIRI-Chicago and IABC-Chicago boards, Maryellen brings depth and breadth to this role.
In no other industry are women consumers more dissatisfied than financial services, particularly in the investment management space. Women with a meaningful amount of investable assets represent a substantial and growing market opportunity for large wealth management firms and independent advisors alike.
American women are the single largest economic force in the world and the wealth management industry is competing aggressively to win over women clients. Highly educated, affluent women – with a net worth between $500,000 and $1 million — represent one of the biggest growth opportunities for independent financial advisors. They are more likely than men to work with a financial advisor and to rely on an advisor as their primary source of financial advice.
The influence of women is reshaping the financial services industry, from products to sales to service. But here’s the rub: in no other industry are women more dissatisfied than with financial services, and in particular, the investment and advisory side of the business.
The financial advisory industry is undergoing rapid and transforming change as the model transitions toward a relationship-based consultative culture. This trend dovetails with the insights, communications and advisory techniques that are effective when working with women clients.
• Recognizing the importance of relationship.
• Understanding their lives and their values.
• Communicating clearly and intelligently, without talking down to them.
Over cocktails around the pool of a beautiful home overlooking Lake Michigan, I unexpectedly generated a small crowd of women – and it wasn’t to dish about my shoes. The topic was investing and this group of affluent women was all ears. Educated and sophisticated, some of them were high earning professionals while others hadn’t worked since before their children were born. They all shared one thing in common: a strong interest in learning how to make informed decisions about their finances.
Empowering women to seize control of their financial lives is a movement whose time has come. Women are reporting a greater interest in and knowledge about financial products and investment services, but when it comes to taking action …. they report a confidence gap.
Read more about Women, Investing and the Confidence Gap in my guest blog on Kristen Luke’s Wealth Management site.
1. Understand her beliefs about money. What is more loaded with emotion than money? Whether the association is with power and control or security and safety, money means different things to every woman. For a woman with an abundance outlook on life, a relatively small amount of money may represent great wealth and potential. A financially self-made woman told me recently, “I love making money, but I am terrified I’ll lose it!” Create a conversation around all five areas of money — spending, saving, investing, borrowing and giving – to understand her values around money. Money may mean security or it may be the means to create a legacy. This is an important dialogue that signals you care about her.
2. Communicate to connect. One size does not fit all women. Develop a conversation around her life stage to understand her situation, needs and priorities. This study of her life will give you the insight to identify needs she probably doesn’t know she has and will drive specific planning solutions.
3. Your values are your brand. Work on clearly articulating your approach to financial planning, investing and other areas where you serve your clients. When deciding on a financial advisor, women care deeply about your approach and could care less about your brochures. Your competency is a given. Your core values are your brand. During this one on one dialogue, women are sizing you up against the criteria that mean most to them: how often do you communicate with your clients, by what means do you communicate with clients, what is your decision making model, do you bring ideas to the table and are those ideas in her best interests or yours. Transparency is critical.
4. Fulfill the role of resource. Assume the role of resource and educator about all things financial. An increasing percentage of women report a growing or high level of financial acumen. Yet, women say that their confidence in making investment decisions lags behind their knowledge about investing and financial products. Most advisors find that the most delightful clients are the most knowledgeable clients.
5. Create community. Generate ongoing female client loyalty through community. Convert your passive referral strategy into a community for women. Align with other complimentary professionals to host regular networking events for your shared base of women clients.
My husband and I have a running joke about the devices in our life that hold the allure of a consuming carnal passion. I accuse him of loving his honey voiced GPSy more than me, but only when we’re in the car. Every once in a while, he complains about the time I spend with my lover, TED.
I’ve had TED on my mind a lot lately. In case you haven’t noticed, there are two TEDx conferences taking place in Chicago this month (TEDxMidwest and TEDxWindyCity). Add to the mix a few more business events styled along the lines of the famous TED conference format and my phone is ringing a bit off the hook with appeals for help to master the “TED Talk.”
The 18-minute TED Talk format has generated an amazing amount of attention. TED Talkers are witty, irreverent, passionate, brilliant storytellers. TED Talks can transport you to another dimension or ignite your ACT NOW button with the power of nuclear fusion. The opportunity to present at the annual TED conference in California has made celebrities of obscure academics and conferred credibility on some we might scoff.
Now that TED Talks are available on a snazzy Internet site, the impact on reputations and ideas is amplified. More than six million viewers have propelled TED Talker Jill Bolte Taylor to the number one position. A neurological researcher, she delivers a jaw dropping account of reaching nirvana during her own brain stroke. After all the hours I’ve spent on meditation cushions and yoga mats, I thought I had a sense of what nirvana may look like if I ever reached it. Watching Dr. Bolte Taylor revealed the limits of my imagination.
The TED Talk format has rapidly influenced business, too. TED has upped the presentation ante, and anxious executives and curious onlookers want to know: how do you do a TED Talk?
These amazing 18-minute presentations appear effortless but actually require a great deal of effort. TED organizers nurture their speakers along, beginning with The TED Commandments:
- Thou shalt not simply trot out thy usual shtick.
- Thou shalt dream a great dream, or show forth a wondrous new thing, or share something thou hast never shared before.
- Thou shalt reveal thy curiosity and thy passion.
- Thou shalt tell a story.
- Thou shalt freely comment on the utterances of other speakers for the sake of blessed connection and exquisite controversy.
- Thou shalt not flaunt thine Ego. Be thou vulnerable. Speak of thy failure as well as thy success.
- Thou shalt not sell from the stage: Neither thy company, thy goods, thy writings, nor thy desperate need for funding, lest thou be cast aside into outer darkness.
- Thou shalt remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
- Thou shalt not read thy speech.
- Thou shalt not steal the time of them that follow thee.
The TED conference format is driving crowd accelerated innovation in the world of business presentations, an effect that was in full display yesterday at the “Breakthroughs” symposium hosted by the Coleman Entrepreneur Center at DePaul. The event featured 18 experienced Chicago entrepreneurs, who each spoke for 18 minutes about the pivotal breakthroughs in their lives.
One big breakthrough was the conference format. Speakers were asked to present naked: no power point, no podium, nowhere to hide. This is the impact of TED, which values authenticity more than polish, storytelling rather than lecture and insight over data.
So what’s this got to do with crowd accelerated innovation? It has raised the bar on presentation quality. In turn, it’s driving a huge amount of effort in presentation making. The increase in video availability, especially on hand-held screens is another accelerator.
Most business people are okay presenters, but few stand out in a crowd. Okay will not be good enough going forward. Presentation making is a relational skill. It starts with stripping down and getting naked.
A few thoughts to help you present naked:
- Tell a story. Stories are your bridge to connecting with the audience. Stories make meaning and create context. This is the key to sticky messages. It’s also the key to presenting without a power point deck. Stories flow with a universal logic. You don’t need a script to tell a story.
- Dress your story in emotion. Your primitive brain responds to input much more quickly than your modern brain. Humans respond to universal patterns of experience. Your audience may not remember what you said, but they will definitely remember the way you made them feel. Summoning your emotional nature also is the key to stagecraft. Emotion will drive you to use your voice as an instrument, physical gestures for emphasis and to move closer to the audience to connect with individuals.
- What you practice is what you present. An experienced business owner and seasoned presenter confessed that presenting naked created a case of nerves that inspired him to rehearse, rehearse and rehearse some more. The more you rehearse, the more you are physically embodying your presentation. In other words, you are creating presentation muscle memory. This doesn’t mean you must go on stage empty handed. Almost every speaker at the “Breakthroughs” event carried note cards (three thumbs up). A few even carried their iPads with them to the stage (extra credit for coolness).
Powerful presenters connect with their audience by communicating at all three levels of consciousness: body, mind and spirit. This is where yoga provides a model for effective communications techniques. Many thanks to The Leadership Yoga for allowing me the opportunity to guest blog about applying the principles of yoga to presentation skills.
PRESENTATION YOGA
At some point in your career, it’s likely you will be called upon to make a presentation. Leadership potential increasingly is measured by communications performance and a presentation is a demanding, high stakes forum. A weak presentation can undermine your credibility, while a strong presentation can build your reputation as a leader.
A presentation opportunity can be as informal as introducing a new idea around a conference room table or presenting from a stage to hundreds of people. Regardless of the format or the size of the audience, your challenge and opportunity are the same: to make an impact.
This is where yoga provides a model for effective communication skills and presentation performance. Powerful communicators and great leaders make an impact on their audience by connecting with them at all three levels of consciousness: body, mind and spirit. Applying the principles of yoga to your presentations will help you to connect with your audience through an exchange of energy, by engaging their imaginations and inspiring their best selves.
Beginner’s Mind
Regardless of how many presentations or PowerPoint decks you’ve created, leave them all behind. Engage your beginner’s mind — a mindset that is continually open to seeing and learning something new in every experience, particularly familiar experiences — and cultivate a new perspective on how to communicate. Consider how a story might replace bullet points or how a visual image could replace an indecipherable graph.
Set your intention
While presentations are a platform to demonstrate expertise, make an intentional choice between ‘making’ a presentation and ‘giving’ a presentation. Giving a presentation is an opportunity to express yourself, to articulate your passion and conviction about your topic. Write out a clearly worded intention for what you hope to give your audience and how your audience will feel, think and act as a consequence of your presentation. With your intention set, focus your attention on the present and the task of creating the content for your presentation.
Cultivate empathy for your audience
Demonstrating that you understand them is the first step in connecting with your audience. Empathy is the vehicle for understanding your audience so that you can tailor an effective and resonant presentation. Empathy is not mind reading, but a process where you recognize, interpret and respond appropriately to another person’s emotions and the thoughts or beliefs these emotions can produce.
As the science of self-inquiry, yoga provides a methodology for developing empathy. Through self-observation and meditative self-inquiry, you will begin to recognize your own behavior, thoughts, biases, prejudices, base thoughts and spiritual awakenings. Empathy for others is a natural outcome of understanding the full scope of your own human nature.
Use your imagination, your instincts and your best self to empathize with your audience:
Who are they? Imagine what a day in the life of your audience looks like. Tap into the emotional tone of their day.
Why are they attending your presentation? Everyone has an unmet need, problem to be solved or a desire to be fulfilled. What do they expect from you?
Why may they resist you? How does your audience view the pros and cons, the trade-offs and the benefits you offer? What emotions underly their belief system?
What’s your story?
The minute you open your mouth to speak, the audience is asking: So what? Who cares? What’s in it for me? Leaders and effective communicators answer these questions through storytelling. Stories can touch people in their hearts, stir their emotions, question their beliefs and motivate change.
The first and most important story is your own. Asana and reflective practices promote continual self-examination of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Debunking our own limiting self-talk opens the door to more possibilities and expands our options and choices. One’s own experience of this process can be applied to developing compelling stories that will connect, engage and inspire your audience.
Stagecraft
Effective communicators know it’s not what they say, but how they say it that captivates and commands attention.
The audience listens to your words only when other conditions are met. Humans are neurologically wired to perceive at the physically energetic level before the frontal cortex begins the work of intellectual processing. Non-verbal communication accounts for the majority of the impression a presenter makes on the audience.
Asana practice develops physical control and keen awareness of your body language, which accounts for 55% of the impression you make on the audience. To increase your impact, choreograph your gestures to support your language. Also, pace your presentation like a yoga practice, working toward an energetic peak.
Breathing exercises develop the vocal vitality that is critical to your communications performance: it accounts for 38% of the first impression you make as communicator. Vocal energy fuels a dynamic delivery. It’s this energy that takes your audience from passive listeners to actively experiencing your message.
At the top of every financial advisor’s reading list should be Meir Statman’s “What Investors Really Want: Discover What Drives Investor Behavior and Make Smarter Financial Decisions” (McGraw-Hill, 2011).
Statman writes with the flair of a best-selling author and the authority of a behavioral finance expert. His elegant premise, “investors are not rational, they are normal,” will confound advisors who have been conditioned to believe the opposite.
Settle in for an engaging read about individual investor psychology and motivations. Investors seek the same emotional satisfactions they get from shopping for shoes and or a new car. Statman identifies and expands on the utilitarian, expressive and emotional benefits investors derive from their portfolios to enhance not only their wealth, but also to express their taste, status and values.
Behavioral finance is not new. What is new is Statman’s fresh approach, which moves the insights and lessons of behavioral finance from esoteric to actionable.
Yoga is a set of skills to cultivate self management, personal leadership AND powerful communication skills. To learn more, link through to Indezine, whom I thank for the opportunity to guest blog.
Presentation Yoga: A Conversation with Bess Gallanis
Indezine: What is Presentation Yoga and how can it help everyday presenters be better-equipped delivering presentations?
Bess: Effective presentations are the product of a combination of skills. Presentation Yoga is a set of exercises to help presenters stay centered under pressure, manage their physical energy and project their authentic, best selves.
These also are the skills of great storytellers. The minute you open your mouth to speak, the audience is thinking: “So what? Who cares? What’s in it for me?” Effective presenters get ahead of these questions by telling stories. Stories can touch people in their hearts, stir their emotions, stimulate them to question their beliefs and motivate change.
Presentation Yoga begins with exercises in mindfulness, which is the practice of being focused on and present in your experience. Effective speakers use this skill to relive the experience of the story they are telling. As a result, they project a genuine and powerful emotional energy that resonates with their audience at a physical level. This is authenticity. We can use a dictionary to define authenticity, but most people trust that they know it when they feel it.
Meditation, breathing and stretching exercises help reduce stress and manage energy. The breathing exercises also help to develop breath control and vocal vitality. Vocal energy takes your audience from passive listeners to actively experiencing your message.
As a reflective practice, yoga cultivates listening to – and challenging — your inner voice. Every presenter at some time or another has heard that voice, the one that screams about performance anxiety and fear of failure. Challenging your insecurities and trusting your gut instincts are powerful tools to use in scripting a new mental talk track. Presentation Yoga includes confidence boosting visualization and mantra exercises.
Indezine: How and when did you discover and practice the relations between how yoga principles can benefit presenters – tell us more.
Bess: After a few years of serious study, yoga and meditation practice with master teachers like Deepak Chopra and Thich Nhat Hahn, I began to connect the dots between my personal and professional worlds. Yoga and insight meditation are a set of practices that emphasize mindfulness and self-inquiry as the primary tools of self-mastery. If you are not the leader of your inner world, you won’t be much of a leader in the external world.
Like the strands of a braid, leadership and communication skills are integrally linked. As leadership guru Warren Bennis says, “Leaders are driven to express themselves.”
If you study powerful presenters and watch how they connect with their audience – whether it’s around a conference room table or from a stage — you can see that they are communicating from all three levels of consciousness: body, mind and spirit. This is where yoga provides a model for presentation performance. I don’t mean ‘acting’ performance, but rather the impact a great presenter makes on the audience.
It did not take long before I began to develop business tools based on yoga to help my clients expand their presentation skills to meet the leadership demands they faced.
My challenge was to develop tools that were accessible, particularly to people who were not familiar with Eastern wisdom technologies. Though the tools are different, the concept of self-management and authenticity translates across cultures. My clients have been very receptive to the centering, meditation, breathing and visualization techniques in Presentation Yoga. One of my clients, a middle-aged, public company CEO, practiced yoga to prepare for a challenging presentation to investors.
Storytelling is the most difficult skill for business people to get comfortable with. We’re conditioned to trust data as infallible and to mistrust our own judgment. Presentation Yoga helps the most hardened data cruncher bridge the divide from communicating to connecting.
In “The Social Animal,” New York Times columnist David Brooks draws on 30 years of revolutionary science to conclude what yogis have known for 3000 years: the unconscious mind is most of the mind. Our most important life decisions are made at that level of emotion and primeval instinct and we draw our deepest satisfaction from human connection. These insights carry huge implications for leaders, communicators and business builders.
Many thanks to Gary Jesch and Console Call, a webinar production and online marketing company, for hosting me as guest speaker for its monthly Leadership Series. These are the key takeaways from last week’s webinar about how to take your communication skills from good to great:
1) Authenticity is the New Cool. Leaders, effective communicators and moving presenters communicate with intention. They bring their entire being — mind, body and purpose — the table. Good to great takeaway: It’s not what you say, it’s how you make them feel. For more: read the posts under category ‘Presentation Yoga.’
2) The Best Story Wins. The human brain is wired to interpret the world and our experience of it through stories. Good to great takeaway: Stories are the vehicle for the WOW factor that leaves an emotional imprint that makes for memorability and meaning. For more: read the posts under category ‘Do You Dream in PowerPoint?’
3) Get Ready for Your Closeup. The video age is here. Good to great takeaway: Learn the skills to master and leverage the most powerful communication tool since the Internet. For more: read the posts under category ‘Speaking with Power and Persuasion.’
Container Store CEO Kip Tindell makes an elegant case for communication as the soul of leadership in today’s NYT Sunday Business Corner Office column. Tindell’s Jesuit education shaped his values, which he applied to building a company that for 11 consecutive years has landed on Fortune’s “100 Best Places to Work.” The half-billion dollar retailer consistently has generated year-over-year double-digit compounded growth.
Tindell’s leadership playbook reflects his values-based business philosophy:
- Communication IS leadership. Communication and leadership are synonymous.
- Team is the tie that binds. Calling it “… a beautiful human experience…”, Tindell understands the human need to belong.
- Trust yourself. Your whole self includes the metaphysical, like instincts and intuition.
- No man is an island. We are mutually interdependent, and we means employees, vendors, community, customers and shareholders.
- Business is not a zero sum game.
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