You've Got 8 Seconds: Communication Secrets for a Distracted World

by Paul Hellman

Stress-test a risky disclosure with two questions about your audience: 1. Upside: What does your audience gain by knowing? 2. Downside: How likely are they to want to jump off the plane?

Why should I listen (or read this)? 2. What exactly are you saying? 3. What should I do with this info?

Great questions

A strong purpose statement says what you’re going to talk about and, more importantly, why. Why is the value, from the audience’s perspective. Why answers the audience’s question: “Why should we listen?”

Shared multiple times, good points

A purpose statement is not an agenda. Almost every executive I work with has an agenda—that’s good—but a purpose statement is more important.

Winston Churchill was alleged to have given one of the most memorable commencement speeches, and one of the shortest. Two years into WWII, 1941, Churchill reputedly said,

You need to figure out what’s most important, the main message, versus what’s secondary, the key points.

Experiment with different arrangements. You might tag one of your ideas as the main message, then later decide, no, that idea is more secondary—it’s a key point.

Eventually, a pattern will emerge. Once you’ve sorted and structured your information, you can visualize it like: 1. A solar system: picture the sun in the middle (your main message), then the planets (key points) around the sun, then a few moons (sub-points), near each planet.

Excellent idea for focusing your points

Key principle: Be the audience.

Key principle #1

Most messages and presentations are designed from the speaker’s point of view. That’s upside down.

To make your accomplishments work, tell their story. But stay focused—use the acronym SOAR. S is the Situation; here’s where you describe the context. OAR refers to that trio we discussed previously: Obstacles, Action, and Results. These three pull your accomplishment along.

Great idea for concise accomplishments

Let’s pull this XYZ together: “When we miss a deadline, I get concerned about the effect on our customers.” That’s focused.

People are multi-dimensional. Imagine three centers of intelligence: head, heart, hands.

Head: What do you want your audience to think? To influence thinking, provide facts and data. Use logic. Ask thought-provoking questions.

Heart: What do you want others to feel? To influence feeling, tell compelling stories. Ask others to imagine a vivid scene. Disclose how you feel.

Hands: What do you want others to do? To influence doing, model the desired behavior, or show what not to do. Encourage practice. Call for action.

When speaking to a business audience, you need a compelling point. A good story has multiple points, which means you can refashion it for different audiences and different purposes. But each time you tell it, stick to one point.

Great point

(Opening) Create a first line that grabs attention and makes your audience wonder, What happened next? 2. (End) Create a last line that inspires business-relevant action. 3. (Middle) Connect the dots, first line to last, quickly. Often, that means cutting everything in the middle by ½.

“When you run General Electric, there are 7 to 12 times a year when you have to say, ‘you’re doing it my way.’ If you do it 18 times, the good people will leave. If you do it 3 times, the company falls apart.”

GE CEO quote

“I like to do all the talking myself. It saves time, and prevents arguments.”

Enjoyable quote

Whether you announce or discuss, be clear which one you’re doing.

To build trust, it’s not enough to announce what you’re doing, even if what you’re doing is right. You need to explain why it’s right. For example:

Good point

Announce when: • The matter is nonnegotiable (due to laws, safety concerns, company policies, etc.). • It’s an emergency—there’s no time to discuss. • You have expertise, others don’t. Discuss when: • You need the buy-in of others. • The matter is more important to others than to you. • Others have as much knowledge and experience as you do. Or their complete lack of experience gives them a fresh perspective.

Excellent point

I give lots of advice when coaching executives on leadership messages or presentations. Advice is what they expect and value. But sometimes, when someone wants you to solve their problem, it’s better not to.

Excellent advice point.

the easy ones. Let’s say you’re leading a senior executive meeting at your company to discuss the new corporate values, which don’t seem to working.

You could also ask, “Who here knows the values?” But asking a group the “Who here knows about X” question—where X could be anything whatsoever—is always risky.

I call them opposite questions. Try this one at your next team-building retreat: “Suppose our group wanted to win an award for being completely dysfunctional. What would we

Great point

Stories: “Tell me about someone who’s been really successful here” (not just based on technical skill, but on modeling key values). “And tell me about someone who hasn’t.” Behavior: “Suppose I exceeded my performance goals. What other factors would contribute to a high-performance rating here? What would get me a low-performance rating, even if I met objectives?”

Great culture questions

“All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.” —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, poet, essayist, lecturer

10 Ways to Open Your Next Presentation

Good point to remeber

Analogy. Like imagine, and like story, the visual is key. Example (from my workshop, Smart Questions): “Asking smart questions is like cracking open a safe. You never know what you’ll discover, but it’s probably something valuable.” Notice that while “smart questions” is abstract, “cracking open a safe” is concrete and visual.

I once coached an executive for a similar presentation. The exec faced his audience and—without saying a word—took a few water bottles and placed each one on a different table in the room. No one knew what he was up to; everyone paid attention. Then he said, “This is the way we work—in silos.” He talked about that for a while: the cost of silos, a few solutions. (As mentioned, with props, you don’t need to be literal. A water bottle, for example, can be

A great example on silos

Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist of Apple (and now of Canva) suggests the 10-20-30 rule: don’t use more than 10 slides, don’t talk more than 20 minutes, and, my favorite, don’t use less than 30-point font. 30-point font is large: less words, less distraction. Every time you show a slide, you compete with your slide for audience attention. When a slide is wordy, your audience wonders, “Should I listen to the speaker or read the slide?” Their solution: daydream.

title: “They’re Asleep, But It’s Your Nightmare” Then I’d say, “We talked about three ways

A good title for performance training

When the words and the body language don’t match, that’s a mixed message, and we trust the body language. Some mixed messages are ok, others not.

Another variation: sync the words with your breath, as meditation teacher Thich Nhat Hanh advises; for example, breathing in, strong; breathing out, confident.

Ronald Reagan when he first met Gorbachev. Reagan wanted to wear a coat because it was a cold November day in Geneva, and he was going outside to greet Gorbachev’s motorcade. But an advisor persuaded Reagan, after a long argument, to remove it because, if Gorbachev showed up coatless and Reagan was bundled up, Reagan would look old and frail by comparison. Gorbachev arrived wearing a coat, scarf, and hat. He probably thought Reagan looked strange.4

An excellent point on optics

The fastest way to build trust is to make promises, then keep them. And the fastest way to destroy trust is to do the opposite.

Humility: Admits and learns from mistakes. Seeks and values others’ ideas and involvement. Listens with respect. Shares credit. Command: Takes the lead. Speaks up. Asserts oneself skillfully, without either aggression or undue concern for being liked or agreed with. Optimism: Takes a positive approach to problems and tasks. Imagines and communicates a positive, credible future state. Composure: Demonstrates calm under pressure. Handles stressful situations well. Thinks on one’s feet, improvises. Uses humor appropriately.

I suggested the law of agreement, which comes from improvisational theater. If you’re on stage and someone tosses out an idea, your first move is to welcome it.

Great idea,

The law of agreement, applied to work, means to first greet an idea, criticism, or question with something positive. You could say, “Here’s what I like about that,” or “here’s what your idea makes me think about.” Then state your concerns. Les Moonves could have said, “We’re in a creative business, and your idea is certainly original. My concern is that no one will watch the show.”

Follow up on the law of agreement

Leading a Meeting? Be the Conductor

Meeting idea

The next time you run a meeting, be the conductor. What does that mean? Well, for one thing, be clear about when the meeting starts and when the break ends, and then—here’s the tough part—stick to those times. Sure, you may feel uncomfortable starting or resuming a meeting when people are missing. But that’s what a conductor would do. Be the conductor means to demonstrate command, to assert leadership. That doesn’t mean you should dominate the discussion. But when you’re leading a meeting, sometimes you need to focus more on getting the train to the station, and less on getting all the passengers to love you.

2nd part on meeting idea

Mistake #1: Too much control. You talk, but no one’s engaged. One day, I asked

Meeting rule #1

Mistake #2: Too little control. Everyone talks, but nothing gets done. I once had a dentist—

Meeting rule #2

p.s. Of the last 11 presidents, Eisenhower through Obama (as of 2013), the American public now only rates three as “outstanding/above average.” Kennedy gets high scores from 74%; Reagan, 61%; Clinton, 55%. Two of those men were shot; the other impeached.9

Funny & interesting thought on approval!

To contact Paul about speaking at your organization, or for more information about his training and consulting company, Express Potential®, please visit www.expresspotential.com or email info@expresspotential.com.

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