7 Steps to Effective Communication
#28 01/03/2024
Src: DALL-E
Preface
Matt Abrahams has an amazing book on effective communication and did many talks at Stanford. This post is a transcript of his book and his youtube lectures.
Introduction
There are many occasions we need to do spontaneous speaking such as interviews, introductions, toasts Q&A, giving feedback, and answering cold calls (esp., some one in the meeting asks you what you think?). To be a better spontaneous speaker, we need to work on our mindset and our messaging.
Step 1: Managing Anxiety
Public speaking is the top 5 fear on everyone’s list. Speaking creates a lot of anxiety. Anxiety is useful and helps us. We don't want to remove anxiety altogether but learn to manage it.
A nervous or anxious speaker makes audience uncomfortable. This is when the audience nod, smile to make the speaker uncomfortable. Fundamental goal for speaker is to make the audience comfortable.
High heart beat
Take a deep belly breath.
Exhale is more important than inhale (twice as a long)
2-3 belly breath reduces rapid breathing and feels calmer
Dry Mouth
Drink some warm water
Sweating and Blushing
Hold something cold in palms of your hand
Hold a cold bottle of water
Recognize the signs, greet your anxiety that this is normal and acknowledge. This helps stem the tide. Tell yourself you had these moments before and you did manage those well and you spoke well in the past.
Step 2: Be Present Oriented
We get a lot more anxious when we are worrying about future consequences of not being able to perform well in our speech. We get nervous about the goal we want to achieve when speaking and worry about potential negative future outcomes.
The key is to become very present. Then you will not be very future oriented and not get tensed or nervous.
Tips to get present oriented:
Walk around the building helps being present
Listen to music to get in the moment
Count backwards from number 17
Say tongue twister
Most nervous speaker warm up their voice.
I slit a sheet, a sheet I slit and on that slitted seat I sit.
Do a Power Pose
Step 3: Get out of your own way (Mindset)
Another reason for anxiety and nervousness is because of all the judging and evaluating we do about our material and about ourselves while we are speaking. Although some evaluation when you are speaking is useful, but overthinking will hurt your speech.
Putting greatness as target will make you evaluate and get yourself in your own way. Things that make us feel more pressure and burdens us in our speech:
We want our speech to be perfect and do it right.
We are Type A personalities
We want to people remember our speech
We want to be right, incredibly memorable.
When you're evaluating everything you're saying while you're saying then you have less cognitive bandwidth to focus on what you're saying. The key is to reduce cognitive load and turn the level of judgement and evaluation of yourself down a bit.
Embrace being put on the spot to speak as an opportunity and don't treat it as threatening and challenging. When we are asked a question on our topic, we tend to retreat and make ourselves small as we feel we need to defend. See things as opportunities to connect, learn and find some areas of commonality. With this mindset your tone will be more collaborative.
Reframe the speaking situation as an opportunity to interact with others rather than challenge. When you look at it as a challenge then you will try to protect yourself. Seeing it as an opportunity will make you interact differently.
Rather than striving for greatness, dare to be dull. Try to maximize mediocrity to achieve greatness. Don't try to be great and amazing. Be dull and boring.
Four Mindset Tools
Growth Mindset: Learn and grow from challenges and mistakes rather than accepting what it is.
Not yet….Find the gaps and see how to overcome
Yes, and.. Agree on the disagreement, where do we agree and built on top of this..
Next Play
You missed a shot, move on to your next play rather than thinking how bad it was and how I missed. Same is the conversation, move on.
Rumination in the moment is bad, but reflection after the fact is good. Reflection is going to help change
Reframe the way we think about mistakes. Think of them as Missed takes. Do it again differently.
Step 4: Use Conversational Language in your presentation
Speakers feel the pressure of performing and think they have to do it perfectly. This means you are judging yourself by right and wrong ways. But when you are presenting there is no right and wrong way. Treat speaking as a conversation.
Start the presentation with questions. Questions get your audience involved and makes the speaker feel that this is a conversation. Structure your presentations as a series of questions you are trying to answer. Every section, pose it as a question you are answering for the audience.
Use Conversational Language:
"I am really excited to be here" -> this distances ourselves from the audience. It's a distancing language
Using pronouns in your sentences to make it conversational. E.g., "This is important to you. We all need to think about. What we need to do.. you should consider"
Step 5: Slow down and Listen
when someone starts speaking, we only listen in the beginning and start thinking about our response. As a communicator you are in service of your audience
E.g., Someone asks you how do you think meeting went?
We immediately jump to feedback. But may be they were looking for recognition
Check on the tone and moment in which the question was asked.
Listen both verbal and physical
Listen intently and deeply to understand what's the bottom line they are saying and the crux they are getting at.
[Pace] Slow things down to listen
[Space]
Move to a place you can hear
Give mental space, be present oriented
[Grace]
Pay attention to environment
Listen to the tone and how they say
Listen to your own intuition. Ask clarifying questions
Paraphrase
Paraphrase and follow up with a question or your response
Ask questions to keep the conversation moving on
[Pause] Don't respond right away. Pause a bit to reflect on what we listen to and respond.
Step 6: Tell a Story (Use Structures to Respond)
Respond in a structured way. It helps with processing fluency. We process structured information effectively. It helps not to lose audience. A structured answer helps audience understand.
When you are on the spot, you have to figure out what to say and how to say it in a structured way.
Structure 1:
Problem / Opportunity / Goal
Solution
Benefits
Structure 2:
What / Who
Describe the situation and what happened
Your idea, belief, feedback, product, service
So What?
Why is it important to the person you speaking to
Analyze why it matters and any implications
Now What?
Consider possible next steps based on your insights
What comes next? Q&A, Action Items
‘What’ happened is told by describing the facts of an event; 'so what' by analyzing, sense making, and drawing insights from the event; and 'now what' by applying your lessons for effective next steps.
Structure 3: When pitching a new idea
What if you could ..
So that..
For example..
And that's not all...
Structure helps audience remember what you said. When you provide answers in an interview in a structure then hiring committee can present the information really well.
Step 7: Focus (Keep it Simple)
Often when speaking or responding to a question, we say more than we need to. We want everyone to think how hard we worked to get to what we are saying. We want people to think we are smart by providing as many details as possible.
Sometimes, we are discovering what we are saying and speaking as it comes to mind. Giving a pause, putting a structure helps the audience follow.
Keep it compact and concise in what we say. Keep it relevant. Have a goal when you speak. When we speak we are trying to say three things
Information / Pitch : Our content
Emotion: The emotion behind our speech (passion, anger, sad, empathy etc)
Action: What action we want audience to take