Farzad is the most listened-to person in the division. But it wasn’t always that way. His boss had contacted me saying, “Farzad is a great guy with tremendous substance, but his rambling presentations are driving everyone crazy. Especially my boss!”
Farzad was known as “The guy who talks the most and says the least.”
Farzad showed up for Coaching eager and interested in learning. He said, “I know I’m doing something wrong because everyone multi-tasks when I’m talking, but I have no idea what it is. If you can help me with that, I would love to have everyone listening to me.”
It was Valerie’s first Executive Coaching session of the new year and she was spiritless. She found out the CEO had decided to bypass her for the promotion from VP to Senior VP that she had been counting on. They wanted to bring in someone “fresh and with more experience” from the outside to be her new boss. Ugh!
Valerie got the bad news and then went out on the end of year holiday. It didn’t improve her mood.
“What’s going on?” I asked her.
“It’s hard. It’s hard to come back. It’s hard to look forward to this new year with any optimism. I feel like I’m not being valued. My enthusiasm for what I’m doing is completely drained.”
What was really drained was her ability to communicate effectively. If you look at the above definition of causative, it’s the ability to make what you want happen. And the ONLY way to do that is through the way you communicate.
The only way to persuade is to communicate persuasively. The only way to convince is to communicate convincingly. The only way to shape reality with others is through your communication.
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.
People make a huge mistake thinking that just because they said something, that the other person “got it”. That it registered.
When the person you’re talking to is solidly stuck in a particular viewpoint, when they have an obstinately fixed idea, there can be a time lapse between the time you say something and the time it registers. Why?
Your communication hasn’t ARRIVED.
He was a hard-driving senior executive everyone was terrified of. His criticisms were plenty, immediate and penetrating. Even so, the people in his division were fiercely loyal. He demanded, and they achieved.
Yet even the ones who had worked with him for years trembled with fear when they were called into his office. Most of his people don’t know what real listening is. They are too terrified of him to really listen, too terrified to really be there for him. You’re not hearing anything when you’re terrified. You’re focused on your own survival. You’ve got to really be there for someone for them to open up.
Imagine being in a really good movie. Would you interrupt what’s happening on the screen? Never! You would never let anyone else interrupt either until it’s over.
The audience only gets restless and starts to talk, or wants to do something else, when what’s happening in front of them doesn’t hold their interest.
The right question to ask yourself is, “What does it take to be uninterruptible? What does it take to be so good, everyone wants to hear everything I have to say? How do I keep them totally captivated from my first word to my last?”
When do you give up on someone? That’s something only you can answer, but when the answer to this question affects tens of thousands of people, it’s worth pushing the limits of not giving up.
I’ve seen communication succeed despite all odds, and this is where REAL skill comes in.
Some of the people that have come here for training have no authority and they’re being influenced by the people at the top in ways that block them from doing what really should be done. Their goal for the training is to learn how to influence their leaders, especially when the leaders don’t have the communication abilities needed for others to find them easy to talk to. Especially leaders who don’t listen.
When do you give up on someone? That’s something only you can answer, but when the answer to this question affects tens of thousands of people, it’s worth pushing the limits of not giving up.
I’ve seen communication succeed despite all odds, and this is where REAL skill comes in.
Intention is an invisible wave that carries your communication across and causes you to be successful in being fully understood.
Learning how to create this carrier wave is a game-changer.
People often try a variety of different approaches before they land on the precision it takes to create pure intention.
If you would like a little more magic in your life, raising your affinity for the other person is a super effective and rapid way to create it.
It’s not something that needs to happen only once in a while. You can do it in every conversation you have. Even in horrible, terrible, hammered situations with “difficult” people. Especially in those.
Amy came to Causative Communication thinking she had to learn to “be more forceful”, but that made her feel defeated because it was so far from who she really is, and it wasn’t who she wanted to be. It meant sacrificing too important a part of herself.
I loved her immediately.
The problem wasn’t that Amy was soft-spoken. The problem was that she had absolutely no intention when she communicated.
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.
Most people have a lot of attention on themselves, what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling, what they want, what they’re going to say, etc. etc. etc. etc. It’s a deeply trained-in self-consciousness that makes the most important question in their mind when they’re giving a presentation the absolutely wrong question and that is, “How am I coming across?”
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 all had tears in our eyes. Elizabeth is an exec in the C-suite of a successful organization. Their senior exec team did the Causative Communication course together, and now, a month later in our follow up session, they were talking about the successes they created in the preceding month.
For Elizabeth, who was a stunning success in her professional life, this was personal.
Elizabeth‘s 12-year-old son, Matthew, had hit a stage where he wouldn’t talk to or look at her anymore. He defiantly turned his head away from her whenever she was talking.
You can imagine the pain wrenching her heart. Physically he was still in the house, but she’d lost his eyes. She’d lost his heart. She’d lost his trust. She’d lost all connection.
What I love about Causative Communication is that you learn simple truths that require very light energy and produce powerful outcomes.
We spend a lot of time on the concept of affinity. This is one of the most misunderstood, undervalued, underutilized, and yet most INDISPENSIBLE elements of deep, rich, emotionally satisfying human relationships.
Affinity ISN’T what you’re thinking. Affinity is what you’re FEELING.
I was explaining to Emily why I was not able to attend a meeting where I was not essential. The acknowledgement she gave me was a very resentful, “Bummer”.
I then tried to tell her what I had already booked during that time, and also why the meeting would be fine without me. Emily’s face was sour as I talked and she gave me an even more resentful, “Bummer.” She clearly was not listening to me.
My first impulse was, “This is not fun. I don’t like talking to you. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
And Emily was about to walk away herself.
At first, I was happy it was over, and then I thought to myself, “What would I tell a student to do in this situation?”
They already know how to walk away. But what they don’t know is how to transform an impasse like this.
George helps sales people close big deals. His track record is impressive. On average, he saves them 30 to 40 hours per sales proposal. His advice also increases their win rate by a wide margin.
George can look at a proposal or presentation in advance and with 100% accuracy tell you whether it will close the deal.
He has a very simple method. He has a computer algorithm which simply counts the number of times they use the word “YOU”. He compares that to the number of times the sales person mentions their own company.
Proposals where the prospect name is mentioned 10 times for every one time the sales person’s company is named (a ratio of 10:1) are a slam dunk and the deal is going to be closed.
Why is that? Is it because people are egotistical and they want it to be all about themselves? No.
If you look at the list of skills that make a hero, the ability to be in the moment is at the top.
When Dillon Reeves was asked how he knew exactly what to do to stop the bus to avert a catastrophe, it turns out he’s been carefully watching his father drive for years. His father said, “He’s always been very attentive to his environment.”
This extraordinary boy stands out. In a distracted world, he is awake, alert, aware.
Awareness is king.
The problem people have, when they’re not aware, is they don’t know what they’re not aware of.
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