The reason I’m writing about this is because of the holidays. I’m the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants and we celebrate Lithuanian as well as American holidays. So we always get a double dose of celebrations throughout the year.
From my earliest memory, there was never a holiday dinner where someone did not get up from the table, possibly in tears or wounded silence, storm out of the room and slam the door loudly. Never. It was not always the same person, we would rotate.
We got offended easily, and the way we handled it only made it worse.
Even so, I challenge you to find a family that loves each other more than we do. If ever anyone said anything bad about any one of us, they were in trouble.
That’s how it used to be.
Gregor had made an overnight change, both at work and at home. The results were so powerful, it turned his world inside out.
It was during the Causative Communication workshop that Gregor came to realize he only “half listened to anyone”. His mind was always moving on to “what’s next”. He was mentally halfway out of this meeting and heading to the next one no matter where he was.
At the end of the 3rd day of the workshop, Gregor made a life-changing decision. He said, “I’m going to stay fully present in every conversation. I’m going to give 100% of my focus, really listen and really understand. No shortcuts.”
Thanksgiving has inspired this article because Thanksgiving always reminds me how wonderful, even magical, affinity is.
Affinity is a feeling. It’s what you’re feeling about the other person, your emotional response to them. And very specifically, it’s how much you like them in that moment.
Affinity can fluctuate, even within one conversation. You can start out with low affinity and end up with high affinity. Or start high and go low.
“I’m now walking into meetings and making what I want happen. The first thing I noticed was that everyone started listening to me differently. Even my boss. Now people go quiet when I speak and genuinely listen, even my superiors. I hadn’t realized there are different kinds of listening. This is REALLY different. After that, it’s not hard.”
This broke all the rules considering where Agoston was on the corporate ladder. He was young, early in career and had no authority. But he spoke up at meetings, in hallways and conversations. His influence was growing daily. It wasn’t long before he was promoted and began rapidly moving up the organization.
Before he did the Causative Communication workshop, no one listened to him.
What made the difference for Agoston was mastering the skill of…
The question, “What do I need to say to get the outcome I want?” is a good question. Knowing the answer to it is essential to being causative.
The reason people experience difficulties when they’re looking at a situation through this lens is because they don’t realize that they’re skipping steps.
Everyone also tells me, “I know that listening and acknowledging are ‘the right thing to do’” and they wish they could do it because, “A good person does it.”
But, there seems to be a big split between “The right thing to do” and GETTING THINGS DONE!
Of course, people want to do the right thing and be a good person, and the people I teach really are good people already. But more than anything, they need to GET THINGS DONE!
There’s a love that happens at work that’s not a romantic love. It comes from sharing and working together to achieve a deeply-felt, and deeply personal, purpose. It comes from pure appreciation. It comes from real admiration. It comes from the joy of creating something incredible with someone or someones. Perhaps you are thinking of someone in your life that you feel this for as you read this. Then you know - it’s powerful and deep.
Large corporations give us an extremely limited vocabulary for expressing this deep love. And great restrictions on how we communicate it.
“The thing about working in a really large corporation is I’m not very powerful.”
Carla didn’t realize that what she was telling me wasn’t a fact. It was a decision.
Many people don’t get this. They confuse their decisions with “the facts of life”. These only become facts after the decisions that create them. Different decisions create different facts.
Here’s how it played out for Carla and how she did the impossible.
Jayne showed up for Causative Communication desperate for a solution.
Her arguments were logical, rational and she had no idea why it wasn’t working. This kind of situation didn’t just happen once in a while in Jayne’s life. It happened a lot.
Jayne thinks light years ahead of most people, she sees what they don’t see, she comes up with answers faster than they can perceive problems. And when she has to communicate from her world to their world, if they’re not already in her world, they don’t follow her.
If you are like Jayne, here’s what you can when logical arguments don’t work.
Latisha showed up for Transforming Your Presentation Skills in quite a state. She was very self-conscious. No matter what I said, she kept asking me to coach her on her hand gestures and her words.
“Do you think this hand gesture is better than this one? Do I have more presence if I put my hand on my hip like this?”
On and on. It took Latisha all morning to realize I wasn’t going to coach her on any of that.
It’s a common mistake - I’m always coaching people on this point.
John sat down in front of me with a sour look on his face.
We were filming his first video in the Causative Communication training session. I have the students role-play a real situation with me, a situation from their lives that’s challenging for them so I can see how they handle pushback. We hadn’t even started and he was already looking at me with resentment.
It didn’t help that the look on his face was overlaid with a thin veneer of artificial civility. The first words he said to me were the forced polite, “Hello, how are you?” with a small, tight, fake smile. The look in his eyes told me he didn’t care.
John had no idea he looked this way.
Then John told me what he wanted from me in a tone of suppressed exasperation. He was restraining his frustration, but it was unmistakable. His face and tone betrayed him.
This made his communication feeble, the outcome hopeless. It made him powerless.
When we were discussing it afterwards, I asked John what he was thinking when he first sat down with me.
He said, “The last two times I tried to talk to this person, it really didn’t go well. I got nothing but resistance. I was expecting the same resistance again.”
And this was exactly what I was seeing – his overwhelming anticipation of a person he couldn’t influence, anticipation of an unsurmountable problem. Which is the same as saying that he came into this situation dragging the past into the present and anticipating failure.
John had no idea he was doing this. And he had no idea the impact it was having on his outcome.
Why is this important?
Let’s begin our New Year by talking about Vision.
Vision is all about seeing. The kind of vision that I’m talking about isn’t seeing what’s on the surface. It’s about seeing PAST.
On Day #1 of Transforming Your Presentation Skills, we usually film our students.
As we watch the first video together, we see very different things, the students and I. They usually hate themselves. This has everything to do with vision. What I do differently is….
When I first started Effective Training Solutions in my 20’s, I was a staff of one. This made me the CEO, which made my mother laugh to no end. After she was finally done laughing, she looked at me, and with great pity and sadness, said, “Oh, honey, why don’t you get a real job?”
As confident as my parents had taught me to be, my parents were terrified that I was going to fail. But I had learned well from them.
Even if it was all I had, I had a dream, and I knew that nothing else was going to make me happy but living that dream. I knew that you can make any dream come true if you don’t give up on it. And now, I’ve been living my dream, every day, for over 30 years.
We were meeting for the first time. Her face was hard, stern. She had her head tilted back and was looking down her nose at me. Her voice was uncompromising.
“I am the Chief of Staff here. We are responsible for billions of dollars of new product development and I report directly to the Chief Operating Officer. Everything to the COO goes through me. I make sure everything gets done. I have global responsibility.”
Her eyes challenged me, daring me to top that.
I looked into the heart of this woman and said, “Very nice to meet you. You must have done a lot to get there.”
I wasn’t flattering her. I was understanding her.
She looked into my eyes and changed into a different person. Her eyes softened and she smiled very slightly.
She thought for a moment and said, “Honestly, it’s a tough job, they don’t always listen to me.”
I thought about that for a moment and quietly said, “I can really understand that. That would be tough.”
I was in no rush. I wasn’t being sympathetic. I was understanding her.
She looked into my eyes to see if my understanding was true. Being understood was new to her. She saw it was.
Some people think you have to be “born with” the skills and charisma that make a really great public speaker. Not true. Let me tell you the story of Henry.
I was invited to give a two-hour talk on presentation skills at a technical conference for a highly specialized professional association.
At the banquet the night before my presentation, I told the President of the association, Steve, that I wanted to line up a volunteer to coach during my talk. He asked what qualities I was looking for and I said, “Someone who really needs to improve in their presentation skills.”
Steve enthusiastically told me Henry would be perfect and I said, “Let’s go meet him.” Well, meet him I did. Henry hardly took his eyes off the floor while we were talking, and for the brief moments they did come off the floor, they went straight to the ceiling or the wall on our right. Turns out, Steve interpreted my request as, “Who is the absolute worst communicator in this group?”
Henry didn’t look like someone who liked to be told what to do. I told Henry, “You know, I’m going to be coaching you in front of 300 people.” He glared at me for a brief moment and said, “What does THAT mean?” I said, “I’m going to be telling you what to do and you’re going to have to do it. Are you okay with that?” He mulled it over a little (looking at the ceiling) and then said, “I guess that’s okay.” Neither one of us was sure that it was, but with these words we locked in our next day’s destiny.
After Henry left, Steve said, “I hope you’re going to coach him on looking at people!” And then laughed for 2 minutes straight.
Tamara was nervous. In two days, she had to give a presentation to 400. Her first really big one.
It was Day 1 of Mastering Virtual Presentations and it was difficult for Tamara to practice without her teeth chattering.
The problem with being nervous is it makes you lose touch with everything good about you. Sometimes to the point where you can’t see anything good about yourself. The things you tell yourself at these moments tend to be dreadful.
Tamara was doubting whether she could speak without forgetting what to say, without everyone seeing how nervous she was.
There was a lot riding on how well Tamara did. If the Salespeople got excited about the new product, the revenue it would generate would be tremendous. But they had so many other products that they were selling, one new one often didn’t register. Tamara was one of many speakers throughout the day that would all turn into a blur.
As one doubt piled on top of another, Tamara doubted even her own ability to speak coherently.
She was a nervous wreck.
It was a truly exciting product she was going to present. If only the Salespeople understood what it did.
In Tamara’s case, it was not a matter of adding anything to her presentation. It was a matter of subtracting.
Last week I wrote about Victor, a VP I was coaching on Executive Presence. I wrote about the effect Victor’s facial expressions were having on others and how it diminished his Executive Presence.
Victor’s BIGGEST realization was when he saw a screenshot of his face during a moment he didn’t think he had any facial expression, when he was feeling neutral, not one way or the other, not positive or negative, not really feeling anything.
What shocked Victor when he saw his face was that his “neutral” expression looked COLD.
People don’t realize that when you put a neutral expression on your face, you look cold. Try it in the mirror and see for yourself. Get your neutral face on and then look.
Neutral has no warmth in it. Zero.
And no warmth equals cold. There’s no way around it.
When it comes to human relationships, neutral leaves them cold about you. Possibly even defensive. You are discouraging them from warming up to you.
Larry, the Senior Vice President, was horrified.
It was an important meeting with important people. He was watching Victor, a newly promoted Vice President, and was completely horrified by what he saw. It wasn’t about what Victor was saying…he wasn’t saying anything. The problem was what Victor was doing.
Larry sent me an email saying, “You’ve got to coach Victor on his Executive Presence immediately!”
I said, “What specifically?”
It turned out to be something I’ve been coaching a surprisingly large number of people on, so I decided to write about it.
Larry said, “Victor is doing great work. But when he’s in a meeting, Victor looks totally bored, completely disengaged. He’s too relaxed, leaning back in his chair, totally disinterested. And often he has a disgusted look on his face. He’s creating a horrible impression.”
I told Larry, “No problem, it’s an easy fix.”
It was. It was one of the fastest coaching transformations in the history of the world.
A couple of days ago I started the first Executive Coaching session with Marcos. I asked him to tell me about his goals for the coaching and he said, “I really want to learn about Executive Presence.” I asked him why.
As he was telling me his goals, he apologized three times.
“I’m sorry, this probably sounds like a silly thing. But what I’d really like is…”
“That probably doesn’t make any sense, but what I was thinking was…”
“I’m sorry that was such a long-winded explanation of what I am looking for, I hope that makes sense…”
He’s not the only one apologizing. If I count the number of times each week that someone apologizes to me for communicating, it’s quite a number.
“I’m sorry if I’m coming across opinionated…”
“I’m sorry, I just have to say this…”
“I’m probably taking too long to explain this …”
This is a new phenomenon in society. Somehow perfectly wonderful people have been made to feel they need to apologize for communicating.
I could spend an entire article talking about how this came to be, but I want to get right to the point:
It’s not healthy.
Many people ask me what happens when TWO people who totally disagree, but who have BOTH learned Causative Communication skills, come together? In other words, when they each know how to make what they want happen, but both are super intent on achieving their own opposing or competing outcome? Wouldn’t that just cause a fight? Do they get stubborn and persistent? Does it go on forever? Does it stick in an unresolvable stalemate? Does it get ugly?
Let me answer that question with something that just happened.
When Rick came to the Causative Communication workshop, one of his prime motivations was a situation with someone he called “the difficult guy”. We’ll call this guy Philip.
Rick and Philip completely disagreed on important details of a big project. Up to this point, every single meeting turned into an argument. They never agreed on anything. They never came even slightly close to achieving the outcomes they wanted. All they managed to do was irritate each other.
During the Causative Communication workshop, as part of his practical assignment to apply what he was learning to real life situations, Rick decided to try what he’d learned in his next conversation with Philip. A real test.
Rick decided to initiate a conversation about a previously unresolved topic, but this time he would strictly follow the full process of the Communication Formula and see what happened.
Rick wasn’t going to give an inch on what he wanted, he was just going to follow the specific process of the formula while they talked about it.
Paula was a young “Early in Career” engineer, her first job out of college. She was excited to land in a successful corporation filled with 80,000 employees. As a new member, Paula was at the very bottom of the towering command chain.
While her position was small, her vision and her dreams were big. More than anything, Paula wanted to do good in the world around her.
She came to Causative Communication to learn how to communicate effectively with the whole world where everything was new to her. She was young and wide-eyed and innocent, no accumulated failures pulled back her confidence. She was driven by her dreams, not by her fears.
Paula knew she had no command power over anyone, but she could already see that communication is a powerful force, and had concluded by watching others that the ability to communicate is the most powerful ability she could have when it came to working with a whole lot of people.
She was part of a small team that was part of a larger team that was part of an even larger team. Paula often attended meetings with 40 others from her division. Everyone had seniority and experience over her.
With the communication skills she developed in the workshop under her belt, Paula spoke up with confidence in these larger meetings. She voiced her thoughts, she acknowledged others, she participated. She didn’t try to control the meeting. She just wanted to be a part of it.
Benjamin: “I used what I learned and I changed two teams.”
Fred, George and Sam disagreed and simply said, “No. That’s not what happened.”
These were corporate leaders attending a virtual online Causative Communication workshop. Their assignment, after the second training session, was to spend several weeks using their new communication abilities and observing the results.
The teams that Benjamin was talking about had been stuck in an argument for weeks prior to the training. Their meetings never moved beyond stubborn debates and were disappointingly unsatisfying and unproductive, much disgruntled grumbling on both sides. They were each “right”, but unable to unite to solve the bigger problem the organization needed them to solve.
There were extremely smart people on both sides. Genuinely good people who all believed they were doing the right thing.
Unfortunately, their communication ability was nowhere near up to the challenge of solving the heated, disagreement-filled situation they were all in.
Benjamin was the one person who decided to do something about it. He arrived to the training tremendously motivated. Benjamin was frustrated because the lack of cooperation seriously interfered with his ability to be productive and move forward in his own job.
In the first two training sessions, he worked on his own ability to communicate. He learned how to create a real human connection and a level of understanding that uplifts every conversation. He developed the ability to transform any conflict into harmony, then lead discussions into creative, productive and satisfying outcomes.
He had 3 weeks to put his new skills into action and make them hold up in this hurricane.
When we got together again at the start of the third day of training, they all were reporting back on what they had done, and the results they had produced.
Benjamin: “I used what I learned and I changed two teams.”
The others: “No, Benjamin. You changed the whole organization.”
I was watching Jed give a sales presentation. The faces of his audience were attentive and respectful. They were also unsold. Unmoved.
In other words, Jed’s ideas weren’t landing the way he wanted.
They were politely waiting for Jed to come to the end. They had probably already mentally formulated a polite way of telling him, “Thank you, we’ll consider it” as they gently ushered him out the door.
Jed had no idea why he was losing it, and he kept going. As Jed talked, he got visibly more and more enthusiastic as a way to pump energy into the meeting, which did nothing for his audience.
Jed knew something was wrong, but had no idea what it was.
I have seen innumerable methods for attempting to vanquish stage fright.
Bianca addresses groups of 3,000 customers at a time. She’s in sales. Her way of coping with terror was to run out on a large stage with very loud music, seemingly all “pumped up” and yell at the crowd, “Hey! How's everybody doing?” It was about as far from her true personality as could be, and the second she started her presentation it was obvious she was tense nervous.
Peter found two people in the audience on either side of the room. First, he talked to one, then he talked to the other. They were the only 2 people he looked at. Anchoring on only 2 people didn’t handle his stage fright, but it kept him from totally losing it.
Risha is an engineer. She presents project updates to a skeptical and demanding senior leadership team. Her solution was to avoid all eye contact because she didn’t want to see their disapproving looks, she forced herself to keep her eyes squarely fixed on her notes and her slides.
Lynette powered through her talks on pure nerves and adrenaline, and collapsed with exhaustion when they were over.
If any of these methods of handling stage fright worked, they wouldn't have it.
What they’re all trying to do is drive their symptoms out of existence. The symptoms include every flavor and intensity of fear, from feeling slightly nervous and on edge to complete terror.
The reason these methods don't work is because they don't address the root cause of stage fright. And most people have no idea what's causing it.
If you don't know what's causing it, how can you fix it?
Sam put them to sleep within the first 10 minutes of his 40-minute presentation. He’s not alone in being able to do this.
The problem with corporate presentations is they’re lifeless. Audiences slowly drown in a sea of droning boring corporate “they all look alike” PowerPoint presentations.
They all start with, “Today I’m going to talk to you a little bit about…”
Then they unroll a slowly moving parade of too many uninspired slides endlessly connected by unimaginative transitions of, “Now on my next slide you’ll see…”
If this is you, you’re gradually putting them to sleep. Your audience slowly, but politely, disengages. Their minds start drifting and they start covertly multitasking, their attention desperately seeing something to keep them awake.
If they possibly can, your audience will start interrupting you. I coached a VP last week who told me that when his people present to executives they always hear, “Okay, let’s stop here, stop presenting for a moment, just let me ask you some questions ….” and the execs just take over and drive the presentation into a ditch (as far as the presenter is concerned).
Here’s the thing to know about audiences: they only stay with you as long as they are learning from you, and what they’re learning must be new and interesting.
I know, I know. The problem is you don’t have exciting content to work with. You have, well, corporate presentation material. And, let’s face it, nobody’s ever made an action movie out of a corporate presentation. I understand your challenge.
But just because your material may seem boring, it does not mean that you have to be.
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