Bullying is a hot topic. A majority of people have opened their eyes and recognized the prevalence of bullying and its devastating effects. Surely a tipping point has come when even popular television sitcoms like “The Big Bang Theory” take on the Goliath of bullying in our society. School Boards and teachers everywhere have instituted policies of no tolerance for bullying.
Zero Tolerance
Permissiveness and undefined limits create a climate in which bullying thrives. A bully who experiences no clear consequences for antisocial behaviour will continue it and escalate it. I applaud the “zero tolerance” initiatives emerging in the education system. Perhaps zero tolerance will one day expand into society at large, because bullying is just as prevalent in the adult world as it is among children, and it’s just as destructive.
In a few weeks, I will be speaking to a conference of women teachers on “Empathy and Empowerment: How Teaching Public Speaking Skills Can Reduce Bullying”. Zero tolerance programs with severe consequences for bullying can at least provide protection for victims. That’s dealing with the problem at one end, where bullying tendencies have already manifested. I would like to explore the possibility of doing complementary work at the other end, of changing the mindsets that allow a climate of bullying to exist in the first place.
Empowering the Victim Consciousness
Boiled down to its essence, I see the bullying climate as a product of two mindsets: a lack of empathy on the part of the bully and a lack of empowerment on the part of the victim. I’m going to address these two mindsets in reverse order, and save empathy for my next article.
Whether or not the Old Testament confrontation between David and Goliath ever really took place, the story provides us with a fascinating study in archetypes. Goliath was a classic bully – huge, strong and loud, deriving enjoyment from doing violence, physically and emotionally, to others. Yet short, willowy David, possessed of unshakeable assurance of his own worth and skill with a sling, and secure in his support system (belief in his god) was not intimidated. A bully dominates through disempowerment of the victim, yet David clearly did not feel at a disadvantage. In fact, he seems to have felt the scales were tipped in his favour. He had no need to protect himself with armour (he was offered physical armour, but we could interpret that as the emotional armour of fear and defensiveness.) He knew that who he was, was enough. He didn’t have a victim consciousness. Goliath, the bully, had no victim.
Not Intimidated
People who fear (or even dislike) public speaking have some degree of a victim consciousness. They assume the audience is full of bullies who will judge, criticize and disempower them, doing violence to their feeling of self-worth. They are caught in a mindset that gives other people the power to dictate how good they feel about themselves. No wonder they’re intimidated! That’s a completely false premise! No one has the ability to reduce another’s value or worthiness. A person’s opinion is almost entirely a product of their own habits of thought, and has nothing to do with what and who another person is. Great speakers have a noticeably strong sense of self, and are not intimidated by other people’s opinions. I believe that good public speaking training addresses this issue.
Not Victim Material
I think we draw to ourselves people and situations that match our own inner state. What if we used public speaking training to help school children develop an inner state of self assurance? I don’t mean the usual memorizing a written composition and then reciting it. That’s a human tape recorder, and it merely adds to the fear. I mean the real public speaking skills of authenticity, eye contact and the development of a speaker-listener relationship. What if we proactively provided kids with a classroom support system that gave them the assurance of the right to speak and the right to be heard? Could we help them develop a ship of consciousness whose sails wouldn’t even attract a bully’s wind?
The after-Christmas flight was going to be full. Shortly after I had sat down and fastened my seatbelt, a young man and woman paused beside my seat, waiting for the line of passengers ahead of them to proceed down the aisle. Evidently they had met in the pre-boarding lounge. The woman looked to be in her early twenties, and the man was perhaps closer to thirty. He was doing the majority of the talking. In the ninety seconds or so before they moved on, the young man probably said the word “like” a dozen or more times. He seemed to insert it, like, every few words.
We gain an impression of someone in the first few seconds of meeting them. Our mind immediately puts the person in a category and forms a long-lasting perception of who and what they are. In the first few seconds! Our behaviour towards others is strongly influenced by our perception of them, by the category our mind has put them in. If we perceive a person in a positive light, we will be open and receptive toward them – the opposite if our perception is negative. Nothing brands a person, placing them in a mental category, faster than their use of language.
We move in different circles in human society. In some circles a casual approach to speech is expected, and a person speaking grammatically correct English might not fit in. My young man, however, was traveling in business class, and English was clearly his mother tongue. He was neither an immigrant nor an unskilled labourer. For all I know, he might be a wealthy entrepreneur with a university degree!
Quite apart from what the reality might have been, my perception of the talkative young man was that he was immature, uneducated and not very intelligent. My mind made an admittedly unfair evaluation based entirely on the fact that a man of nearly thirty was speaking in a manner I might have expected from a teenager, one whose parents hadn’t known enough or taken the trouble to guide their child to speak with correct English grammar.
There’s nothing wrong with the word “like”. It’s a preposition. In broad terms that means it is positioned after one word and before (pre) another word to show a relationship between two things or ideas. The dictionary defines “like” as being “similar to”, or “having the same, or almost the same, qualities and characteristics as” something else. The weather outside, for example, can feel like a sauna, because it feels similar to a sauna. But it can’t be, like, really hot. Used that way, the word is incorrect and meaningless. Either the weather is or isn’t hot; it’s not similar to hot. Yes, I may be ranting, but I’m ranting because it matters.
Young people in high school, college and university move in a circle of society composed of their peers. It’s a culture all their own. Certain styles of speech are expected if one wishes to fit in with certain groups of that culture. Incorrect and repetitive use of the word “like” is accepted language in a large number of young cultural circles. A problem arises, however, when these young people graduate and begin looking for positions in the adult world, where more grammatically correct speech is expected. There’s a clash of language cultures.
Leaders in business, government and the professions agree that one of the most important factors in success and career advancement – if not the most important factor – is the ability to communicate effectively. Speaking is a major element in communication. Appropriate use of language is important, because it affects how we are perceived and received in certain circles. Ah, but the way we speak is largely a matter of habit. You can’t change your language patterns overnight. It takes time and intentional work. The man on the aircraft, no longer a youth, was stuck in a youth-oriented language culture. Young people who successfully negotiate the cultural language shift into the adult world will stand out above the crowd. Who among them dares to differ from their peers, dares to have enough interest in their future to develop good speech habits today?
Emotional connection is the magic carpet that carries information to a listener’s memory. A speaker’s highest priority is to make that connection. Without it, content is either not heard at all or is not remembered.
Recently I watched a good speaker sacrifice her connection with an audience because she felt her information had a higher priority. What she didn’t realize was that by doing so she made it difficult, if not impossible, for her audience to remember the information she felt was so important.
The situation was a fundraising concert for a charitable organization that does very needed and valuable work in the community. In the course of the evening, there was an opportunity for a representative of the organization to speak about the service they provide.
A bright, lively woman walked to the front of the hall. She began by voicing her appreciation for the performers and made some self-deprecating, gently humorous comments about her own lack of musical ability. She connected beautifully with her listeners. She carried her body well, smiled and made eye contact. She spoke extemporaneously, and her voice was vibrant, warm and conversational. Because she was making an emotional connection, she was memorable.
As she made the transition into talking about the charitable organization, she said, “I’m going to read this because I don’t want to forget any of what I want to tell you.” She then held up a sheet of paper and proceeded to read aloud five or six points. At least she held the paper high enough that we could still see her face –except, of course, for the portion of the audience blocked out by the paper – but with her eyes on the printed words, she lost the audience eye contact that had been serving her so well only moments before. Her voice immediately lost its warmth and naturalness. While it didn’t exactly become a monotone, it had nowhere near the engaging, compelling quality it had when she was speaking conversationally.
Not only did the speaker lose her emotional connection with the audience, the audience lost the sense that she was personally connected to what she was saying. By making information more important than connection, she made that very information unmemorable. I was listening carefully, but after her presentation, I couldn’t have reported to you what she had said – all except for the last point about the service being free of charge to the people who use it. After reading that point, she lowered the paper, her audience connection and vocal vibrancy snapped back into place, and she repeated that final, crucial point.
The speaker had no lack of passion for her subject. Ironically, I suspect it was that very passion that caused her to make the counter-productive switch from talking to reading, causing her words to lose their impact, rather than increase it.
Our brains don’t easily retain dry data. We retain information with an emotional element far more readily and more deeply. The emotional region of our brain – specifically a part called the hippocampus – connects emotions and senses with information to create short-term memory, and then sends those memories out to other parts of the brain for long-term storage. The stronger the emotion that’s attached to the information, the more securely it is stored. That’s why stories are so powerful, because they generate an emotional connection with the audience.
What could our speaker have done instead of reading? As a representative of the organization, she was thoroughly versed in their services. She knew far more than she needed to say. It would have served her better to hold a card with just key words on it, briefly glance at the card to remember the next point, immediately look back at her listeners and talk to them the way she did so effectively at the beginning of her presentation. That way she could have maintained her audience connection while still remembering her points.
An audience is not a tape recorder. People connect with information only if they feel connected to the speaker who delivers it. And so I repeat – a speaker’s top priority is to create an emotional connection, a feeling of connection, with the audience. That’s the magic carpet that your words ride on to reach your listener’s memory.
Last week I spoke to a group of high school teachers who wanted to help their students give better presentations. When I talked about gaining the trust of the “security guard” in a listener’s brain, one teacher spoke up:
“You say the below-conscious brain is concerned with survival and needs to know if a situation is safe. What about interest? What about a class of teenagers on a Friday afternoon and the last thing they’re interested in is Shakespeare?”
I suspect that interest in a topic is largely a neo-cortex, conscious brain issue, not an emotional/instinctive, below-conscious brain question. I doubt if I would choose to hear a talk on recent developments in plumbing, even if the speaker were pleasant, engaging, and I felt at ease in his or her presence. It’s not my area of interest. Yet for someone who works in that field, innovations in plumbing would easily keep their focused attention. They are there because they are consciously interested.
That said, though, the teacher made an important point. While a speaker’s behaviour does have to gain the trust of the security guard for a person to be willing to listen, it’s not enough to make a good first impression and let it go at that. Once its safety is assured, I think the below-conscious brain wants other things, too. I think it wants ongoing engagement.
Active participation is always more engaging than passive listening. Questions are a wonderful way to keep your listeners engaged. I sometimes begin by asking my audience what they want to learn from this session. A “How-many-of-you…?” question enrols your listeners in your talk. For example, “How many of you are here because you want to get rid of public speaking fear?” I raise my hand to show that I’m expecting them to respond that way. Then I’ll ask, “How many of you don’t have a problem with fear, but just want to improve your skills?” Again I raise my hand. By asking two contrasting questions, I involve everybody in the room. They’ve all made a conscious decision to respond, followed by the physical action of raising their hand. They are now active participants.
Questions hook the mind, because the moment it hears a question, it seeks an answer, whether or not it will be required to give it. Frequent questions help your audience stay focused, so don’t hesitate to precede a statement with a rhetorical question or to frame statements in the form of questions. Questions that require participation, such as raising a hand or calling out an answer, engage your listener even more.
Remember ALWAYS to thank your audience for participation of any kind.
Sitting in a chair and just listening is mind-numbing, even when you’re interested in the topic. An audience needs to participate in some way every five minutes or so to stay engaged. In addition to questions you can include what’s called a “state change”. A state change is anything that creates a change from passive listening mode, thereby enlivening the energy of the audience. (Watch your listeners closely. One yawn should buy a state change for your whole audience.)
In addition to questions, here are a few state changes you can try. Not all of them will be appropriate for every situation, so tailor your choices to fit your audience.
- Ask people to repeat important words or an important point with you.
- Get the audience to finish your sentence, especially if it’s something you’ve repeated a couple of times. By now they know what the word is, and can supply it.
- Require agreement. “If you get that, say ‘aye’.”
- Stand up and stretch. (I love the place in my presentation where we do exercises to create good posture.) Do deep knee bends. Dance. Play air guitar.
- Do deep breathing.
- Have your listeners turn to the person beside them and…
- Share what they have just learned
- Say, “I didn’t know that”
- Shake hands and exchange business cards
- Give each other “high-fives”
- Hug
By keeping your audience engaged and energized, you ensure that your information will be better received. Still, I’m glad I’m not the one who has to teach Shakespeare to teenagers on a Friday afternoon!
It was getting dark on a bitterly cold winter afternoon in Winnipeg. I was sixteen and returning home from an after-school piano lesson that had not gone well. Standing at the bus stop, chin tucked in and shoulders hunched in the heat-conserving posture that most Canadians adopt for five or six months of the year, I felt just then that very little in my entire life was going well.
The bus stop was a transfer point. Bus after bus pulled up to the curb to discharge and take on passengers, all but the one I was waiting for. Yet another unwanted bus arrived, and I happened to lift my eyes forlornly to its windows. Directly opposite me sat a young woman, not many years older than I, in the window seat. She looked down at me…our eyes met…and she smiled.
I was stunned! A perfect stranger had looked at my wretched self and smiled! A kind, friendly smile that said, “Everything’s going to be alright.” It was the last thing on earth I would have expected, but the warmth it brought my heart may have been what I most needed in the whole world. I hope I smiled back at her, though I may have been too shocked. I have remembered that smile over and over for nearly fifty years, and have blessed that young woman every time.
People need to be smiled at. Whether they are consciously aware of it or not, your audience needs you to smile at them. They need your warmth and acknowledgement, and at some level they notice if it’s missing. When you fulfil their need, your listeners are immediately more receptive to you. A smile makes a difference.
This is the final article in our series on making friends with your listener’s security guard – the one in the below-conscious level of their brain who decides whether they feel comfortable enough with you to listen or not. Since the security guard’s job is to assess the behaviour of a speaker, I have proposed that there are six behaviours that will get the guard to pass you through the gateway to your listener’s conscious, thinking brain:
- Stand with an upright, confident body carriage.
- Speak with a vibrant voice, lots of expression and clear diction.
- Make eye contact with your listeners.
- Present your information as a story and illustrate your points with stories.
- Be your own authentic self and let your passion show.
- Smile!
Even from a physiological standpoint, smiling at your audience is a smart thing to do. When the muscles in a person’s face crinkle up in a smile, it causes their brain to release chemicals like serotonin and endorphins. Those are the chemicals that tell us we feel good – safe, relaxed and happy. The mirror neurons on either side of the human brain make it probable that when you smile at someone, they will mirror your emotion. They will smile back. So when you smile at someone, and you cause them to smile, their brain releases good-feeling chemicals. Thanks to those chemicals, you are now associated in that person’s brain with feeling good. Presto! Their security guard trusts you and their thinking brain pays attention.
It needs to be a real smile, though, not a mere stretching of the lips. The smile needs to reach your eyes. Indeed, when you look at someone with appreciation, when you welcome them into your space, the smile originates in your eyes, and because it feels so good, your mouth decides to join in the fun.
The bonus for the speaker is that when you smile at your audience, you cause good-feeling chemicals to be released in your own brain. You feel happier and more relaxed, too. Isn’t it true that we do our best work when we’re doing it from a happy, relaxed inner state? It’s the only place from which we have anything of value to offer others.
Perhaps we all take ourselves far too seriously. Why not make us and everybody around us feel better? Let’s all smile a lot more often.
My husband’s son, Dave, owns a successful company that distributes high-tech computer components. He loves technology. He loves his job. He is so full of energy you can almost see sparks flying off him. He believes completely in the value of his products. I know very little about the world of high-tech but when Dave is standing in our kitchen telling us about a new product or “app,” he speaks with such enthusiasm, it’s all I can do not to wave my wooden spoon in the air and shout, “Where do I sign?” It’s not just Dave’s enthusiasm that’s so compelling. It’s his authenticity. He’s not afraid to let others see how he genuinely feels. Dave is a perfect example of a speaker who makes friends with the below-conscious security guard in his listener’s brain.
Bette Midler sings with the same enthusiasm. I love to listen to her CDs. She sings every number as if it were her favourite song in the world, pouring her whole heart into her singing, whether it’s a lively, rousing song or a soft, gentle one. She moves people with her energy and her authenticity. If we made a list of people who are comfortable with being their authentic self, who don’t care what other people think, Bette Midler would be near the top. The combination of her passion and her authenticity make her audiences love her.
Think back to your high school, college or university years. Who was your favourite teacher? I’ll bet it wasn’t someone who droned on at the front of the classroom, dispensing endless data and showing nothing of their personality. I’ll bet it was someone who was enthusiastic about his or her subject and let you know it. My favourite teacher in university was a man named Jim Schell. He was positively on fire about music theory. (Music theory, of all things!) He moved all around the front of the classroom, gesticulating broadly. His face, his voice, his body, his whole manner radiated energy. For him, music theory was fun! And he wasn’t afraid to show it. Jim made such an impression on me that I can still see him vividly in my mind’s eye and that was a lot of years ago!
What if your personality is not the outgoing, sparks-flying-off kind, like the three examples I’ve given? What if you are a gentler, quieter person? Can you be authentic and still engage your audience? Yes! Introverts have personality, too! Introverts feel just as much passion as extroverts. We all just need to show our audiences who we are. Who you are is enough, if it’s the real you.
I was present at an event where a candidate for the Green Party was the speaker. He is an environmental scientist with a rather soft-spoken, gentle personality. Granted, he was a bit stiff and colourless while reading his prepared speech, but when he was answering questions afterward, he was riveting. He wasn’t a highly animated speaker, but he did make sure his voice carried to the back of the room, and he spoke from his heart as well as from his extensive knowledge. Although his answers were expressed in a gentle way, they carried the intensity of his passion. We could hear it in his voice and see it in his eyes. His authenticity and his passion allowed him to connect with his audience.
There isn’t anyone quite like you on the face of the earth. Rejoice! Your audience doesn’t want an imitation of anyone else. They want to connect with the real you and they want to feel something. If you want to inspire, motivate or move people, you have to talk with energy and passion. Don’t be afraid to let them see who you are. Audiences don’t need you to be perfect. They need you to be passionate and authentic.
We’re in the middle of a series of articles looking at ways to make friends with the “security guard” in your listener’s brain. That’s the gut-level, largely unconscious reaction your listener feels toward you, starting from the very first impression. If you can get a person’s unconscious protective system, their security guard, to relax and trust you, that person will listen to you. If not, your words and ideas either will not reach their conscious, thinking brain at all – they will have tuned you out and gone off on a more interesting, internal voyage – or what you say will be immediately forgotten because you made no lasting impression.
To be remembered, you need to make a good first impression, and then you need to keep on making a good impression throughout your presentation. So far in this series, we’ve talked about good posture and open body language, for that all-important first impression. We’ve discussed clear articulation, speaking with passion and making eye contact with your listener to let them know you acknowledge and accept them. Now let’s talk about telling stories. The human brain responds to narrative better than to any other form of information.
Since time immemorial, human beings have been using narrative to try to make sense of their world. Every culture, from every part of the globe, has a tradition of stories in its background, stories that have been created to teach, to entertain or to explain the unexplainable. Responsiveness to stories seems almost to be part of what makes us human.
As a speaker, then, why not take advantage of this very human love of tales to generate engagement with your audience? Try telling a story right at the beginning of your talk to introduce your topic. Sprinkle stories throughout your presentation to illustrate your points. Keep your story focused, though, and avoid getting bogged down in details. Everything in it should serve the point you are making. If the directions you gave someone to get from Point A to Point B are not relevant, leave them out. Name dropping is obvious to everyone but the person doing it. If you include names in your narrative, check to be sure that it’s to serve your audience’s need, not your own.
Our brain seems to have a hard time remembering abstract data. That’s probably why it was so hard for some of us to learn the times tables or to memorize a list of French verbs in school. Put those dry facts in the context of a story, and they immediately become easy to remember. If you have facts and figures to relate, you’ll find your audience much more attentive if you stick to round numbers and put them in a human context. In other words, tell a story with them. (Detailed data don’t get remembered orally, anyway, so if the exact figures are necessary, put them in a handout for people to read later.) And don’t forget that stories often include humour. Is there any reason why you can’t present a financial report as if it were a tennis match between debits and credits? Let your imagination loose. You have nothing to lose but your audience’s boredom.
One of the reasons stories are easy to remember is because they create emotion. Don’t you find that the memories that stick with you are ones that are associated with some degree of emotion? The stronger the feeling, the more vivid the memory. That’s because the hippocampus, part of the limbic system of the brain (where our emotions are centred) is strongly involved in forming, organizing and storing new memories. It connects emotions and senses, such as smell and sound, to memories. It then sends those new memories out to other parts of the brain for long-term storage. The more emotion you can engender in your audience, the better your words will be remembered. One way to do that is to speak with enthusiasm and show your own passion. Another way is to tell stories.
When you were a child, you were probably told not to tell tales. Here’s a positive, constructive way to do just that. In this context, telling tales is a good thing!
Your two most effective tools for making friends with the security guard in your listener’s brain are direct eye contact and a smile. Used together, they are an unbeatable combination.
By “security guard”, I mean the partnership between the brain stem (instinct) and the limbic system (emotions) – a partnership that operates below the level of conscious awareness. You could say it’s the level of “gut reaction”. When you “just have a feeling” about someone, whether positive or negative, that’s your security guard in action. Its job is to ensure your safety, and it does that by observing and evaluating the behaviour of the people you come in contact with. If their behaviour doesn’t feel right, you won’t be receptive to what they’re saying.
Few behaviours give a stronger message to a listener’s security guard than what a speaker does with her eyes. In western culture, lack of direct eye contact, along with the position of the head, can be interpreted in a wide variety of ways, none of them positive. If you want to be received as a “straight up” sort of person, keep your head straight up and look your listeners squarely in the eye.
But it can be so difficult! I watch participants in my SPEAK UP! workshops struggling to maintain eye contact for more than a split second. They’re fine during the initial exercise – looking into the eyes of each group member while counting aloud to five. Maybe that’s easy because it’s meaningless. But the moment they have to think and speak and, hopefully, make some sense, their eyes are skittering off in all directions. Why? I wonder if the problem is not so much looking at others, but letting them look at us.
Does it feel as if people can see too deeply inside if we look directly at them? As someone who was once painfully shy, I can attest to having used eye contact avoidance as a shield, particularly with someone with whom I wasn’t comfortable. Letting such a person look into my eyes made me feel unsafe.
The eyes don’t just take in information. They give a lot away about the person behind them. What are we afraid to reveal when we let people look into our eyes? Inadequacy or unworthiness to speak? Or simply our own fear that we might be inadequate or unworthy? We tend to avoid eye contact because of how we feel inside. It’s important to be aware of what we’re feeling before we can do something to change it. If you have difficulty with audience eye contact, check inside to see if you feel you have to protect yourself from “all those eyes”.
Ideally, you want to maintain eye contact with one member of your audience for as long as it takes to speak a complete thought. Then you pause and move your eyes to another listener for another complete thought. This means you will lock eyes with each listener for around five to seven seconds. If audience eye contact is a challenge, you may not at first be able to do that. (If you can’t tell, get a friend to watch your eyes and give you a report.)
You’ve probably heard the expression “the best defence is a good offense”. This principle worked wonders for me, and I’ll bet it will work for you, too. Practice it first with individuals before you present to a group, but it works just as well for many as for one.
Instead of defending yourself, take the initiative. Instead of shrinking away inside, intentionally have an attitude of moving outward in a warm and welcoming manner. Instead of being concerned that you are feeling uneasy, ask yourself what you can do and say to put the other person at ease. One of the best things you can do to make others feel at ease (which relaxes the security guard, remember) is to show them that you see them, you acknowledge them, and that they are important to you. And what’s the best way to do that? By looking into their eyes. Not only will you make a real connection with your listener, you will experience yourself as a larger, more assured individual and a more engaging speaker.
Continuing with our series on how to get past the security guard in your listener’s brain, today we’ll talk about speaking with a vibrant voice and clear diction.
When I ask audiences and workshop participants, “What’s the most boring element in a boring presentation?” the immediate answer, without exception, is “monotonous voice”. We’ve all heard it – a flat, lifeless drone with no highs and lows in pitch and no variation in volume. You’d almost think this artificial-sounding voice was being generated by a machine. It makes me wonder, “Is that how he/she talks all the time? Even one-on-one?” Surely not! Your public speaking voice should sound as natural as your one-on-one voice.
I suspect there are a number of reasons why some speakers flatten their voice into a monotone. Perhaps the strongest reason is discomfort with having to speak in front of an audience at all. I attended a dinner once, where the after-dinner speaker asked one of his associates, sitting in the audience, to answer another audience-member’s question. As she stood up to speak, I could see from her face that she’d rather be anywhere else on the planet than speak to these hundred-or-so people. Sure enough, her voice lost all its normal tone and expression. It’s interesting how strongly a person’s comfort level with speaking affects the vibrancy of their voice. Remember that your job is to connect, not to impress. If you focus on being warm and welcoming, on giving something of value to your audience, you will increase your comfort level with them.
I also wonder if some speakers are afraid of putting too much expression or emotion in their voice. Perhaps they fear they’ll look foolish, so they don’t use any expression at all. What these speakers don’t realize is that “boring” is a far worse enemy than “foolish”. Besides, expressive is interesting, not foolish! In my “SPEAK UP!” workshops, participants do an exercise to overcome their inhibitions about being expressive. They talk to the group about an event that caused them to feel strong emotion, being as expressive as they can. Then they repeat the climax of their story, being even more expressive. They learn from the group’s feedback that the more expressive they become, the more interesting they become.
People who aren’t used to speaking with expression don’t realize how much energy it takes to be interesting. It takes both energy and effort. But then, if you care about your audience’s experience, you’ll be willing to put yourself out a bit for them, won’t you? It stands to reason that the audience can only get excited about the topic when the speaker shows some enthusiasm.
When you first try it, speaking with more energy and expression might feel so unfamiliar to you that you may be tempted to assume that it’s wrong or unnatural. Don’t be fooled! It’s just new, not wrong. Try it out with some friends or family members. Don’t fake it, though. You have to genuinely feel what you’re expressing, or you really will sound over-the-top and phony.
Energy is also a factor in clear diction. Again, most people don’t realise how much energy and effort it takes to be clear. A lazy approach to diction results in slurred consonants and squashed-together syllables, leaving the audience to try to sort out what is being said. That’s hardly what you want! Using your lips, tongue and jaw more energetically than you’re used to will really feel odd, but the payoff is better connection with your listeners and more effective communication. It’s worth it! If you’re not sure how to go about improving your diction, seek out a voice teacher or speech coach.
Our habits of speech develop over a lifetime. They become so much a part of us, it feels as if they are part of our very identity. If you buy into that, it will feel as if you are doing something artificial, something not “you” if you try to change it. Take a step back and realise that good speaking is simply a skill, like any other. Improving your skills is improving your effectiveness in communicating, not changing who you are. Have courage! It’s worth the effort.
In my last article I described how the below-conscious levels of our brain act as a security guard, choosing either to pass incoming information on to our thinking brain or to block it. That below-conscious (instinctive and emotional) brain bases its choice, to a huge extent, on whether the speaker looks, sounds and feels safe and appealing. My first suggestion of six behaviours to get you, the speaker, past the security guard of your listener’s brain is “Stand with energetic, open body language.”
I enjoy watching a program called “The Dog Whisperer” on National Geographic TV. It features a dog behaviour expert named Cesar Millan. I’m impressed at how often Cesar mentions the owner’s body language as a factor in generating the desired response from a dog or ending up with behaviour problems.
Dogs watch human behaviour with an intensity that would surprise most of us. They register every nuance of face and posture, taking cues for their own behaviour (or what they can get away with.) Cesar frequently instructs a dog owner to stand with upright carriage, “claiming their space” as leader of the pack. When the dog sees calm, dominant body carriage, she recognizes that the owner is in command. She can relax and be responsive, because her leader has everything under control. Without those behaviour cues from the human, the dog feels leader-less, an unnatural state for a dog, causing her stress and anxiety. Her uncomfortable mental and emotional state manifests in what the owner describes as misbehaviour and resistance, but from the dog’s point of view, she’s simply coping with stress.
I see the owner-dog situation as a direct parallel to the speaker-listener dynamic. While listeners may not be aware of it, their below-conscious brain registers every nuance of a speaker’s face and body language. These are silent cues that dictate response or resistance.
Consciously or unconsciously, the first thing your listener registers about you is body carriage. Does it show self-value and assurance, or is it unsure, or even, in dog-language, submissive? Your position as the speaker – one-on-one or to a large audience – makes you leader of that particular “pack”, for whatever length of time you are speaking. If your body language doesn’t match your position, you give a conflicting message to your listener’s below-conscious brain, making it feel as stressed as a leader-less dog. It registers an uncomfortable situation and resists. (Make no mistake, wandering attention is a form of resistance.) When you look like a leader, the watch-dog part of your listener’s brain is assured that you have everything under control. It feels safe to relax, respond, and allow the thinking brain to pay attention to what you are saying.
How many of us received instruction in good posture beyond, “Stop slouching!”, “Stand up straight!” or “Shoulders back!”? For me, the term “good posture” has become a bit tainted with the idea of rigidity, as if we were all meant to stand like soldiers on parade. I prefer to think in terms of body carriage rather than posture, lift rather than ramrod straight. In my book, “SPEAK UP!” I give a number of physical exercises to develop upright carriage. Today, let’s create a mental image for your body to fulfil.
Imagine standing inside a vertical rectangle. To claim your leadership space, you want that rectangle to be a large as possible. Rounding your shoulders narrows the rectangle, but squeezing your shoulder blades slightly so that your arms fall along the sides of your body pushes the sides of the rectangle outward. It also raises your chest. Now let the top of your head push the ceiling of the rectangle as high as possible. Do you feel how that pulls in your chin and stretches out the vertebrae of your neck? Shrug your shoulders and move your neck around to keep yourself relaxed and not stiff, but return to that chest-and-head-lifted, large-rectangle feeling. That’s leadership carriage. And in the words of Cesar Millan, “Remember to relax and breathe.”
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