They say there’s only two ways to get an audience motivated to actually do anything, and that’s either to make them angry or to appeal to their patriotic nature. It’s not much of a choice is it? But if we’re to become effective and influential presenters – and that’s what these blogs are about – then we’ll have to take what we’re given and do as we’re told.
For the latter, a patriotic speech might require a choir softly humming ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ as we reach the climax of our talk – it might be appropriate (just) for parliament or the campaign trail but it’s going to leave most audiences baffled if it’s supposed to be a presentation on remote-server access.

Aristotle made a great remark on the nature of anger. He said that we only ever get angry when either we feel we’re not being treated with enough respect or when a friend of ours is not being treated with enough respect. Only those two situations will generate anger, and no others. Surprising huh?

So to get your audience motivated you’ll need to get them roused. You might well make them angry and therefore motivated, if you make them believe a business competitor is laughing at them behind their backs – or is using underhand tactics to steal customers and clients that by all rights should be theirs. You’ll have to be careful though, as your competitors might hear of what you’re saying and issue you with a writ! Maybe it’s best to name no names.

Assuming you’ve been successful and they’re roused and now baying for blood, you’ll have to direct their energy otherwise the moment will be lost. Be very specific about what they’ve now got to do. Don’t fudge it with “work harder” or “be more efficient” that’s much too vague. Instead set specific targets and goals and then keep everyone up to date with how they’re progressing, so they know what’s working and what isn’t.

Oh dear! I think I’ve just described how Hitler motivated the German people to invade Poland in 1940.

Be careful with this advice; it’s dynamite!

“But then again, too few to mention…” or so the song goes. But there might be a reason why we try so hard to avoid regrets.

According to research – of the psychological kind – experiencing regret is especially painful when compared to other forms of disappointment. And of the two alternatives, ‘we wish we hadn’t’ turns out to be more painful than ‘we wish we had’ if you get my drift.

Let me explain a little more clearly if I can.

If you decide to sell your shares in a company for example, and do so just before they unexpectedly start climbing in value – you’re likely to regret selling them when you did. In an alternative scenario, if you hold on to your shares and the value of them falls, you will also experience regret that you didn’t sell them earlier. However when comparing the two feelings of regret in these two situations it turns out they’re unequal: it seems the level of pain experienced is somehow greater from taking action (when you actively sold your shares) than when you didn’t take action (not acting and leaving the shares alone).

Painful outcomes will inevitably make us think twice before embarking on the same form of behaviour again. The old adage ‘once bitten; twice shy’ has a lot of psychological evidence to back it up. If action leads to greater pain in the form of regret than inaction, then it’s easy to see why we’re so loathe to make changes at work, or in our lives. Poor outcomes will be less painful if they’re a result of just leaving things the way they are; overall we will suffer less than if we intervened and got a poor result.

I’ve often wondered why the expression bandied about by psychologists, ‘change often provokes resistance’ was so frequently proved to be true. Perhaps now we know some of the reasoning behind it.

Why not enrol on the next Successful Speaking Skills workshop. It’s being held in central London on Friday 23rd November 2012. The fee is £190 + VAT. Go to the web site for the joining instructions: www.voiceworkslondon.com

I’ve had great fun in the past with my nephews playing ‘Where’s Wally?’ the game where you have to find Wally in a large drawing – dressed as he always is in his distinctive red-and-white striped shirt, bobble hat, and glasses – in an immense crowd of people. For some obscure reason it’s really quite entertaining and absorbing and nowhere near as easy as you might think.

Wally sprang to mind when I was reading Daniel Kahneman’s book ‘Thinking Fast & Slow’ as he cites a psychology research paper from authors Hansen & Hansen titled ‘Finding the face in the crowd: An Anger Superiority Effect’ (1988). If you haven’t already guessed from the title of that paper, it seems we can detect one angry face in a crowd of smiling faces much more quickly than we can detect one smiling face in a sea of angry faces.

Typically psychologists have pondered why this might be. Their verdict is that an angry face ‘pops out’ because our brains contain a mechanism to give priority to bad news. Shaving a few hundredths of a second off the time it takes us to detect a predator, improves our odds of survival. Threats are given priority, which makes sense I suppose. We benefit from a mechanism that alerts us to danger. Alas no mechanism for detecting good news quickly has been found, and I don’t suppose ever will be.

So what’s the impact of this mechanism when we’re gazing out into a room full of people while delivering a presentation? Are we unconsciously surveying the room on the lookout for a hostile face? You bet we are! From my own experience I know I only have to see one person looking at me critically for me to lose my confidence. Is it the same for you?

Remember that this is the product of a mechanism in our heads, designed to aid our survival and it distorts our view of the world. The negative trumps the positive, says psychologist Paul Rozin. In reality, if there’s only one angry face in your audience and the rest are happy faces, that tells me that your presentation is actually going down very well indeed – so don’t lose your confidence, instead take heart, you’re doing OK.

You know these blogs are chiefly about speaking skills – how we look and sound, as well as how we can win over others to our point of view? Well this one is different. It’s about decision taking, but it’s such a brilliantly simple idea I wanted to write about it.

We’re all familiar with TV shows like BBC’s Silent Witness, where the forensic pathologist casually announces after a quick examination of the body that the murder victim died at 11.23 and was killed by a blow from a stale lemon cup-cake, or by Miss Marple knowing the cause of death just from an inconspicuous stain on the victim’s tie. So post mortems tell you how the victim died, or what went wrong.

When it comes to taking important decisions at work, in meetings for example, there are a number of psychological factors that can disrupt our thinking. First we’re all far too optimistic – so says psychologist Daniel Kahneman – we imagine our decision will be the right one and lead to success. Secondly we overlook anything our competitors might do as a result of taking that decision. Thirdly anyone in the meeting who thinks the decision is a bad one will only feel able to object for a limited amount of time before others in the group will start to see them as being disloyal, so their voices may not be heard in all the excitement. Added to these is the impact of ‘group-think’ as well as ‘risky shift’ which encourages a more extreme decision being taken. (Google these for an explanation if you want to know more).

So here’s a way of preventing the above – have a pre-mortem! Pretend it’s now a few months after the decision was taken and that it’s proved to be a disaster. Ask each member of group to imagine what might have gone wrong. Now the over-optimistic members of the group will be forced to think pessimistically and the previous dissenters will be able to voice their objections. This might work best if everyone writes down their views and submits them. Reasons why the decision might not be a good one will now begin to emerge.

The pre-mortem idea is so simple in the way it reveals the psychological forces that unconsciously allow us to make bad decisions, if employed occasionally, it could prevent any one of us from making dreadful mistakes in the future.

Uh oh! A headline like the one above will probably put you off reading today’s blog – but that’s what it’s about and it’s really simple, honestly.

When I was studying for my psychology degree some ten years ago now, we used to say amongst ourselves as students “psychology is the science of the stark staringly obvious” as over and over again theories with the most extraordinary names and baffling academic descriptions turned out to be things you knew all along.

So let’s start with an ‘heuristic’ – that just means a rule-of-thumb; or in other words a belief, or a loose rule that you’ve aquired from everyday experiences. For example when something sounds too good to be true usually it isn’t! Affect just means feelings or emotions. So Affect Heuristic means a loose rule about emotions.

The ‘emotional tail wags the rational dog’ is such a wonderfully simple way of expressing the impact emotions have on us that I’ve already committed it to memory. I suppose I should acknowledge the bloke who said it first; Jonathan Haidt, otherwise you might give me the undeserved credit.

So how does the Affect Heuristic alter our attitudes, beliefs and opinions? Well it makes us believe the world is a much more simple, tidier place than it is; that good technologies have few costs and bad technologies have no benefits and most deceiving of all, that decisions are easy. But in reality we often face painful choices between benefits and costs.

When it comes to winning over an audience with your beliefs and opinions, then what better theory can we look to than this one? Don’t be afraid to incorporate emotions and feelings into your talks and chances are that you’ll generate the Affect Heuristic in your audience and they’re more likely to believe what you say; that their emotions will take hold and impair their judgement.

The next Successful Speaking Skills workshop is on Friday 3rd August in central London. Why not join us? Go to the web site:www.voiceworkslondon.com for all the joining instructions.

I’m thoroughly enjoying a new psychology book, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, who will already be well known to anyone who has ever studied psychology for Prospect Theory. He won the Nobel Prize for that with his colleague Amos Tversky. I’m not clever enough to explain Prospect Theory accurately here, but Wikipedia has a good explanation – although you’ll have to concentrate hard to grasp it – and concentration is the subject of my blog today.

Are there two forms of thinking: fast and slow? Daniel Kahneman certainly thinks so and he makes a convincing argument for that belief. What interests me is how he argues that our fast and easy form of thinking, is more persuasive than the slower more difficult kind.

Kahneman argues that to win people over you must reduce “cognitive strain”. If your audience has to think too hard they’ll be inclined to question and pick apart your argument.

So when you’re next delivering a talk or presentation, make your slides easy to read with big clear font or easy to follow diagrams. Your chosen font and colour should make a strong contrast with the background. Bright blue or bright red is more persuasive than softer shades he says. Use every day, not pretentious, language. Hilariously it was discovered that those people who use long words unnecessarily are seen as having poorer intelligence and their message lower credibility than those who kept it simple. So effectively trying to sound clever makes you sound stupid!

Another way of making it easy on your audience is to make your ideas rhyme, so they sound like aphorisms. Your message will then stick in the minds of your audience and been seen as more insightful – even when it’s not. So next time you’re trying to win over an audience keep this motto in mind, “Don’t make them wince when you try to convince”.

If you’d like to learn more tricks like these and become more influential and persuasive, then why not enrol on the next presentation skills workshop. All the details are on the web site. Just click on the link: www.voiceworkslondon.com

I went on holiday to Sophia, Bulgaria some years ago. To be honest there wasn’t a great deal to do in the evenings, so I decided to go to the cinema, relying on the fact that nearly all the films showing would probably be in English with Bulgarian sub-titles for the locals. That indeed was the case. But which film? There were quite a few to choose from. The girl at the hotel reception did her best translating the titles. As you might expect the process meant that some of the titles sounded bizarre. In the end I decided to go and see what she said was called “The Disappearing Full Stop”. I couldn’t imagine what it would be about; a pedantic thriller about punctuation perhaps? It was actually ‘Vanishing Point’ starring the irritating Melanie Griffiths and was, as it turned out, rather mundane.

I was reminded of this last week, working with a lovely chap on his wedding speech. He was doing something similar, strange as that might sound. He’d come up with some nice anecdotes about his friends and family that he wanted to include in his speech. Unfortunately he wouldn’t trust himself to remember them and had written them all out word for word on his notes. What he had now was a spoken anecdote translated into a written anecdote that was in turn translated back into a spoken anecdote. Guess what? It didn’t work. The anecdote was now clumsy, wordy, disjointed, convoluted and alas not remotely funny.

If you haven’t noticed, speaking and writing are two different forms of communication. Most of us employ two separate lexicons or vocabularies for each. They don’t and won’t translate easily from one to the other. So when you’re next preparing a presentation and feel you must write it out word for word, at least write it the way you say it – OK? Better still work from notes and don’t write it out at all, although that takes courage and plenty of rehearsals.

Why not enrol on a Presentation Skills workshop? They’re held about every six weeks in central London. Go to the web site for all the details: www.voiceworkslondon.com

“They know I’ve got bad news to deliver, so it’s no good me beating about the bush; I’ve just to tell them the way it is!” This is roughly what one of my clients was saying to me last week. He was obliged to gather his workforce together and confess that redundancies for some of the staff had been planned. Understandably he just wanted to get the ordeal over with as quickly as possible.

It reminded me of that old joke where the Sergeant has to tell one of the soldiers that his mother has died – so he calls them all onto the parade ground and says “All those of you with a loving mother at home take a step forward. Wait! Where do you think you’re going Jones?” brutal and cruel, and perhaps not very funny.

I was concerned that my client was going to be regarded in the same way – as some uncaring member of the management who was out of touch with the workforce. Instead, after some discussion, we explored how this speech would sound if we followed the classical structure endorsed by the ancient Greeks. This would mean beginning, not by breaking the bad news but by showing the workforce how he, the Managing Director, was really one of them. I was won over when he revealed he’d formerly worked in virtually every part of his engineering works. The Greeks would call this ETHOS (letting us know who you are). Next he had to make sure the audience understood the whys and wherefores of this decision, so the facts and figures had to be included – what the Greeks would call LOGOS – and lastly he had to finish the speech with a display of sympathy and regret PATHOS as he revealed the action he was about to take; to lay-off some 40 members of staff. The bad news was now at the end of the speech rather than at the beginning and overall the whole announcement sounded so much better – and he came out of it well too.

As I listened to the finished speech I was reminded of how the ancient Greeks knew exactly what they were doing. Following the order of Ethos, Logos and Pathos works every time.

If you ever go to Kiev, in the Ukraine, like I did last week, be highly suspicious of anyone who tries to convince you that their local delicacy, Salla (raw smoked pig fat) is delicious and will melt on your tongue. With profuse apologies to all my Ukrainian readers, it doesn’t and it’s just as revolting as it sounds. Maybe you have to been born and raised eating it. I’m sticking to Jaffa cakes.

I was there working again with some terrific lively and inventive media people. Understandably not everyone in the group of 25 was fluent in English. However something remarkable emerged; it really didn’t matter all that much.

Those speakers who showed enthusiasm, despite their poor command of English, made great eye-contact and tried their best to engage with the audience were more successful than those who spoke it well but lacked commitment.

Once again it proved to me that the power of body-language, eye-contact and appropriate facial expression, in combination with a varied vocal tone, far outweighs content. Often I didn’t really know what they were trying to say, but I wanted them to succeed: I wanted to buy what they were selling.

For most of the many years I’ve been coaching people in speaking skills, the majority of my students have needed to show greater enthusiasm, add more energy and give their delivery more attack. Usually apprehension and stage-fright turns inexperienced speakers into timid mice!

Just once in a while I come across a speaker who displays all the qualities just described – they’re loud, punchy and enthusiastic; but after a while it becomes relentless! My ears begin to ache. I’m desperate for them to change gear or stop. It’s like they’re driving with their foot hard down on the pedal. I suppose what I’m saying here is that they’re simply trying too hard.

As I’ve said many times in these short blogs, this game (speaking in public) is all about persuasion. Your objective must be to either get your audience to do something; or it’s to get them believing in something – usually it’s a bit of both.

There’s a sort of inverse relationship between persuasion and effort isn’t there? Try too hard and it’s a turn-off. Like those intrusive TV commercials where the voice-over is almost yelling at us to get down to some store TODAY!!! – or those dreadful ads for Cillit Bang! They’re exhausting. The clever technique with persuasion is to make your audience think that they’ve arrived at your conclusion themselves and of their own free will.

So don’t try too hard – draw your audience towards you – don’t push them away. Speak with a reassuring tone in your voice on occassion and for heaven’s sake stop bashing us over the head with your proposals.