Auftreten Archive - Page 3 of 8 - The Art of Communicating

Thank you for your attention

The most overrated speaking advice is to never say “Thank you for your attention!”

It will ruin your talk, the advice goes, because

it’s boring (at least not energising)
it’s disrespectful to the audience because you can’t be sure they actually paid attention (although great speakers usually can)
there are much stronger ways to close your talk (which there are)

The advice is (mostly) valid. It makes for some great anecdotes about bad talks everyone can relate to.

And it has close to zero effect.

I have yet to see any talk where that closing line makes or breaks the talk.

If it does break your talk, you almost certainly have much bigger problems than that line.

Ditch that line. But also, don’t waste your time with the unimportant stuff.

Silly Faces

Making a silly face and writing a provocative statement beneath it is one of the best ways to get people on YouTube to click on your video thumbnail.

If silly faces are what you want to be known for, that is.

Not everything that works needs to be done.

What do you want to be known for?

(Also: if you’re on the other side, the audience’s side, it’s your decision to click on that silly face or not.)

It’s not how good you look or feel

A lot of speaking advice is about feeling good and looking good, e.g. how to feel more confident, how to use convincing body language, how to find more beautiful words or design stunning slides, etc.

While all of this certainly helps, it’s never the point when you’re looking to make change happen.

It’s not how good you look and how well you feel but how strong you resonate.

The main difference is that “feeling good and looking good” is concerned with the speaker while “resonating” is concerned with the audience and how it relates to the speaker.

In order to resonate strongly you need to empathize with how the audience feels. You need to understand what matters to the audience.

It’s about seeing and hearing your audience and caring for their struggles and desires.

It’s about doing the work of figuring out a path and lighting it so that your audience doesn’t have to.

Ironically, my clients tell me that this posture leads them to actually feel good on stage. By shifting the spotlight away from themselves and onto the people they seek to serve, they let go of the heavy weight of being the star of the show. They merely help their audience make change. And that feels good.

The best part is that adopting that shift ripples into everything you do because you can’t unsee the audience in anything you do.

Sometimes, a smile is all we need

Can I ask you a favor?

Could you send a smile to someone who you think needs one today?

It might be as simple as just an emoji. Or you shoot a selfie of you smiling. If you feel like it, why don’t you record a video and say a few nice words?

Do it in private or even publicly.

Whatever you choose, trust me: Your smile will make today a better day.

It’s either good or bad

“Oh, that’s like Instagram but for poems.”

When we see or hear something, our brain automatically compares it to the things we know. We put it in context of the things we have experienced before and find a category for it.

Sometimes, though, we make the mistake of using this category as an automatic measure of quality. We shouldn’t.

Duke Ellington, the famous Jazz Big Band leader, made music in the category of “light music” – according to traditionally trained musicians (read: European classical music) who considered “light” music to be inferior to “serious” music.

Ellington vehemently disagreed with this assessment (as do I):

“You have to stop listening in categories. The music is either good or it’s bad.” – Duke Ellington

I think the same is true for almost any categorical thinking.

Let’s take presentations as an example. A presentation is either good or bad. It changes people’s minds or it doesn’t. It resonates or not.

Whether it took you 300 slides to do so or 3. Whether you told a story or presented plain, raw facts. Whether you were pacing up and down the stage or standing still.

If it resonated, it was good. It doesn’t matter if it was in the “Steve Jobs style” category or in the “my math teacher from junior high school” category.

In other words, never forget that it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

So you want to shine?

Recently, I saw two concerts at a festival. One started with a 3 minute explanation of what we were about to hear: That this was her most political song, yet. Why it is structured the way it is. What it means to her.

The other started with the band playing a groove. Then, the singer entered the stage, stretched her arms wide … and began to sing.

We left the former performance after about 5 minutes and were mesmerised by the latter, glued to our seats for 90 minutes.

It’s the result of a profound shift in perspective. The first band’s major concern was to make sure that we see the brilliance of their music. The band leader worked hard to explain it to us so that we wouldn’t miss it. They wanted to make sure that we could appreciate it. They wanted to shine. They wanted something from the audience.

The second act’s major concern was to give their audience a great time by playing their best music. They did shine. They wanted to give something to the audience.

And so, the paradox outcome was that we appreciated the brilliance of the second performance while dismissing the first.

There’s an important lesson for any kind of communication here. When we ourselves don’t even trust in our own message but rather feel the need to have to explain it before we deliver it, how should our audience trust in it? Even worse: this bit of insecurity shows. Audiences are super good to sense when there’s a dissonance between what a speaker says and what she really feels – whether she really believes in what she says.

Our effort is much better spent with making our message actually brilliant than with explaining why our audiences should consider it brilliant.

Can an ugly site work?

Amazon has a pretty ugly site. It’s overloaded and cluttered. There are hundreds of places to click with several competing calls to action. In design school, their site would utterly fail. Back to the drawing board.

And yet, the site works rather well for Amazon, I’d argue.

So, who’s wrong?

Well, the better question to ask is: What’s wrong?

The metric is.

For Amazon, it’s not about elegance but about conversion. All that counts for Amazon is the numbers and the numbers tell them all they need to know about UX and UI design. If that’s true for you, your time is likely wasted if you obsess over beautiful.

But for others that might not be true. For them, it’s not all about conversion. It might be about trust, sustainability, elegance, quality, influence, reach, or any other metric.

It pays to be clear about your metric before you obsess about what to optimise.

Just the way you are

You’re not Apple. Neither Red Bull nor Tesla.

Keynotes that work for Apple won’t work for you. You just don’t have the media attention that Apple has and you won’t get it by out-producing Apple. It’s not the slick production that make these events work for Apple. Mimicking them is a waste of resources.

PR stunts that work for Red Bull won’t work for you. Buying a Formula 1 team is probably prohibitively expensive for you and you don’t own extreme sports to the degree Red Bull does. It’s not the logo on the cars that make these investments work for Red Bull. Mimicking them is a waste of resources.

The results that these companies see from their marketing efforts are the results of patience and perseverance. They have earned their spots by building an infrastructure around their flagship strategies.

That’s not to say that you couldn’t do the same in principle. But it’s a mistake to consider these marketing efforts as singular events – which many people do.

It’s not one Apple keynote but the history of decades of doing these events and the culture of making a secret of what will be announced exactly that turn these events into these enormous PR waves.

It’s not the logo on Max Verstappen’s car but the history of decades of sponsoring extreme sports plus the culture that Red Bull has built around it that turn these ventures into a huge bargain.

Most of all, it’s been derived out of these companies’ cultures. It’s true to what these brands stand for. It’s authentic to them.

Given the culture in your company. Also, given your budget. It pays to look not so much on what these gigantic companies do but much more to who your customers are. What resonates with them? How can you attach to that?

And then, when you’ve done something that works, stick with it and amplify it. Just like Apple, Red Bull, Tesla, Lego, Coca-Cola, Nike, and all the others did. For decades.

Sign of the times

Walter, a friend of mine, recently claimed that he could tell by the looks of someone’s website when that person entered the Internet. The structure of the site, the design, imagery, even the wording, all hint to the culture of that time.

Indeed, once we adopt a way of doing things, the stickiness of these habits is amazing. Ask someone in their 40s about their favourite artists, and it’s likely that they respond with quite a number of names from the 80s and 90s. Ask someone in their 60s about the best way to learn something new, and it’s likely that YouTube won’t show up in the Top 3.

And yet, the world is moving on. Things change. New ways of doing the things you used to do a certain way show up each day.

While that doesn’t mean that these ways might be better for you, it might very well be that your audience prefers the new way. And so, your willingness to adapt can play a major role in who you resonate with.

It’s helpful to look at this as a choice. And then act accordingly.

Fun or profound?

We watch movies to be entertained (mostly), but we don’t mind learning something in the process.

We listen to a presentation to learn something (mostly), but we don’t mind being entertained in the process.

Great novels don’t stop at being entertaining, they open our eyes to something profound we haven’t seen in quite that way before.

Likewise, great presentations don’t stop at making us discover a profound insight. They do so in an entertaining way.

It’s fun. And it’s profound.

Why choose only one?

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