worked with another person whose shyness was damaging his career and his marriage. He learned to become a more effective communicator at work and at home—and became a CFO.
I helped another client double his speaking fees by making a few small changes in the way he stood in front of an audience.
You’ll learn that what the brain research shows actually happens when people communicate, and how you can use that understanding to become a new kind of persuasive, charismatic leader yourself. You can achieve the same kind of transformation that I have seen over and over again in my work with clients over the past two decades.
How to Read This Book
I’ve sought to make this book as easy as possible to read, given the sophisticated nature of the coaching. Each of the seven chapters describes a particular set of insights derived from my coaching work, supported by a breakthrough in brain research, and discusses the implications for leadership and communications. Each chapter also describes, in very practical terms, a power cue leading to personal communications mastery that builds on the cues before it and overall creates a complete program for your personal transformation. You can jump right to the power cues and skip the research, but I recommend studying it because of the insights it will give you into why people communicate the way they do. It will help you in your pursuit of communications mastery to understand how the brain works and what science is showing us about aspects of the human unconscious.
I’ve tried to anticipate as many of the questions you will naturally have as possible, and answer them in the descriptions of the steps and instructions for implementing them yourself. I’ve also added “field notes” at the end of each chapter that cover some of the issues that may arise as you start to put these ideas into action. Think of them as deeper dives into the practical side of this work.
It’s important to understand that much of this brain research is still in its early stages, and as such I have only included discussion of work that I have personally found to be helpful and practical in my work with clients—a nonstatistical but nontrivial form of confirmation. Where it’s relevant and helpful, I will share stories of my client work to illustrate how the steps work, what pitfalls to avoid, and what you need to focus on to achieve the best results.
This work is going to take some weeks, and it’s not easy. It requires paying attention to aspects of your behavior and others’ behavior that you’ve probably not thought consciously about before. But the results will be worth it. Personal mastery and an opportunity to change your leadership level await you.
When I say mastery, I don’t mean manipulation. These power cues will actually show you how to deal more authentically with your colleagues, your family, your tribe. In seven chapters, you’ll learn how to clear away all the unconscious messages you don’t mean to be sending—and don’t even realize you’re sending—in order to strengthen the messages you want to communicate. You’ll learn to show up as the best version of yourself instead of as a jumble of unconscious fears and distractions. You’ll become more persuasive and more powerful because you’ll become more authentically yourself.
When you’re ready, take a deep breath and turn the page.
CHAPTER ONE
Knowing Your Own Power Cues
Becoming Self-Aware and the Significance of Gesture
This chapter will explore how gesture establishes and regulates relationships and communications on several levels. It will discuss the work of psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow on helping children learn through gesture and the surprising insights into the importance of gesture that resulted from her work. And it will describe the first step in communications mastery: taking inventory of your own gestures to become self-aware.
Let’s Rethink Our Communications
It’s time to rethink how we communicate. We now have a much clearer understanding of what people are up to when they commune with one another. Thanks to significant advances in brain science, we can piece together most of what goes on when people attempt to inform, cajole, persuade, amuse, enlighten, control, tease, infuriate, impassion, or lead each other. We don’t have the whole picture with complete certainty, of course, but we now have enough to go on.
We have enough to understand what it takes to get an accurate picture of your own communications profile, to inspire other people, to understand them better, to lead them, to persuade others, to captivate other people with charisma, and to share your vision by becoming a passionate storyteller. These are the specific mysteries of communications I’ll be focusing on in this book. Each of the seven power cues are specifically chosen to help you in these areas.
Before starting, you need to let go of your current ideas about communications. Whether they’ve come from high school debate training, a college course in public speaking, something your mother told you, or just your common sense, most of what you think you know about communications is wrong.
For example, one common misconception is that when giving a speech, you should “tell ’em what you’re going to say, tell ’em, and tell ’em what you said.” Now, there’s nothing wrong with repetition, but the problem is that the world has sped up since that advice first came down the communications grapevine, and we no longer have the patience to listen to something someone tells us three times.
When was the last time you paid attention when someone went through an agenda slide? You didn’t, right? You were on your smartphone checking your email one last time. How about when a speaker says, “In conclusion, what I’ve covered today is …” You were back on the smartphone or packing up your stuff. (Of course, if you’re really Type A, you paid attention only during the opening summary or the ending summary; the rest of the time you were surreptitiously doing email.)
The point is that that sort of bald repetition no longer works because it moves too slowly for us in our attention-deficit-disorder (ADD) world. Repetition has to be artful, disguised, or impassioned like Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech for it to work on our harried minds today.
The Bad News about PowerPoint
Another misconception that I frequently hear as a speech coach is the idea that PowerPoint helps because all people are one of the following: visual, kinesthetic, or aural learners. Neither idea buried in this generally accepted, appalling misconception is true!
First of all, we’re all visual learners.1 As I indicated in the introduction, we can handle up to 10 million visual bits of information per second, far more than anything else our minds can process. We’re also all kinesthetic and aural learners. We get information in those other ways, too. Just not as much. Of course, there are individual variations, but most of us are average, and that means we’re mostly visual beings. Unlike, say, cats and dogs, which have vastly more developed senses of smell. For us, it’s visual.
Second, PowerPoint doesn’t help; it distracts. All the research on multitasking shows that we can’t do it.2 We first pay attention to one thing, and then another. Moreover, the research on how our brains process visual information, as I alluded to in the introduction, indicates that we don’t actually see what’s in front of us, but rather an approximation of it that our brain matches to reality based on its memory banks.
So what really happens when we’re confronted in a meeting or a presentation with a speaker and a set of slides is that we look at the speaker—because we’re inherently
