Did you take up my Challenge?

Did you watch the clip and decide how the speech and staging hits all the principles of the MAGIC presentation boxes? Well, here’s what I see.

Message: Remember, Henry’s troops have lost a lot of enthusiasm for his cause. He hears Westmoreland wishing they had more men. Henry’s message is surprising. He doesn’t want one more man to share in the honour that will be theirs by winning the battle. Why should we share the glory with anyone else he says? It would dilute what “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers” are about to achieve. “The fewer men, the greater share of honour.” he says.

This piques the soldiers’ interest. Henry knows he has their attention now because in Branagh’s version he physically moves away to see if they will follow…. and they do.

This is the Gracing the Stage part as I see it. He uses the space to gather all the lords and troops together as he warms to his theme. Now his audience is literally crowded together, unified by the space as Henry, in an elevated position, now unites their minds in resolve and purpose. This is a superb use of space to emphasize the message.

Authenticity: Throughout this speech Henry reveals who he really is and what he stands for. “I am not covetous for gold. Not care I who doth feed upon my cost: It yearns me not if men my garments wear; such outward things dwell no in my desires. But if it be a sin to covet honour, I am the most offending soul alive.” He also says that in this venture we are all equals: “For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother: be he ne’er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition.” He is saying that even the roughest yeoman present today is elevated in social rank to equal the king! Great motivation!

Interest: How does Henry keep  them hooked? He paints a picture. He creates a future in which St Crispin’s day forever will belong to each of them. It will be celebrated as a day when they will show their scars to jealous friends and admiring families and remember the glories of this day. “He that shall live this day and see old age will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours and say Tomorrow is St. Crispin. Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars. And say “these wounds I had on St. Crispin’s Day”.

Why painting such a picture works so well as a motivational tool is that each soldier’s version of the future is yet a personal one. They can see in their mind’s eye their own families, friends, villages and contexts. So in reality Henry is creating hundred’s of individual pictures, not just one. Therein lies the genius of the speech for me.

Commitment to Practice: OK,  I mentioned this in my last blog that I am cheating a bit here by pointing to Branagh’s stagecraft and the fact that this scene clearly took a great deal of practice!

Well, I hope you enjoyed this little exercise. Thanks for indulging me in my passion for Shakespeare and may I take this opportunity to wish you and your family a wonderful Holiday Season.

I will be back in the New Year to hopefully paint some pictures for you in which you, like Henry, can rally your own troops and bring motivation and morale to all who hear you.

Related posts:

1. Leadership Communication: Speak with the power of a king
2. The Curious Power of Authenticity
3. Executive Presentation Training

What if you had but one chance to speak and your life and the life of all those who were following you depended on it? How would you start? What could you possibly say?

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers….”

I was recently working with a group of senior executive leaders at one of the world’s largest and most successful high-tech companies  and successfully used our M.A.G.I.C. communication formula to break down some long-standing barriers to effective communication in their organization.

As a part of my preparations I wanted to provide visual examples  for Message, Authenticity, Gracing the stage, maintaining Interest and Commitment to practice.

In the process I found  a  single superb example of extraordinary leadership communication that demonstrates at the same time all five of the MAGIC principles dramatically and profoundly.

Before you take a look at the video here’s some background.

By the time King Henry Vth of England reached the fields of Agincourt in the year 1415,  he was a leader without much of a following. He had promised his army quick wins on French soil and here they were six months later exhausted, hungry, most suffering from dysentery while the French army stood before them fresh, ready for battle and outnumbering Henry’s weakened soldiers by at least five to one.

Several times the French send a messenger offering Henry a peaceful but humiliating way out.

Each time Henry refused.

In Shakespeare’s version of events, on the night before the battle Henry dons a disguise and walks among his troops in the camp listening to their opinions of the King that promised much and had delivered little apart from the promise of death at the hands of French swordsmen the next day.

Henry, like many leaders, finds himself  in an impossible situation. With little time left how can he change the hearts and minds of his men?

How can he rally and motivate them not just to fight but to fight believing they will win?

Shakespeare composes perhaps his most stirring speech for Henry and as I watched Kenneth Branagh’s version of the “St. Crispin’s Day” speech it occurred to me that this confluence of historical Henry Vth, playwright William Shakespeare and Branagh’s film version of the speech hit everything that our MAGIC communication model strives for.

Take a look at the movie clip and see if you can identify what Henry’s real message is; how he creates and resonates authenticity with his audience; how he uses the physical space as a persuasive tool; how he keeps his soldiers interested and how there is a commitment to practice?

Well,  the actors certainly  committed to practice since this complex scene is very long for a sequence that has so few shots in it.

In my next blog, I’ll tell you why I think this scene ticks all the boxes of the MAGIC communication model. And if you have ideas you’d like to share about why this is a near perfect persuasive speech, let me know.

Related posts:

1. Speaking with the Power of a King (part 2)
2. The Curious Power of Authenticity
3. Why Online Presentation Coaching Works

Presentation training teaches you how to drill down and make what's important interesting

What can you learn about authentic communication from one simple question?

In my last post I talked about the difference between how participants at the Center for Creative Leadership come across during a TV interview when asked about personal questions versus business questions.

While the week-long program is not billed as a presentation training course, executives do go through a seven minute TV interview that most say seems to last much, much longer. There are a number of psychological reasons for this. When under stress the brain seems to shift into a higher gear. This is why traumatic events—not that being on TV is traumatic—that actually take but seconds (think auto accident), seem to play out in our memories in agonizing slow motion detail.

The questions our executives get asked have been carefully prepared and are based on interviews with their peers, direct reports and superiors. They are all about real-life business challenges and, while not always easy, they are completely familiar to the participant. They answer earnestly, objectively and even for those without presentation skills training, quite skillfully. And why shouldn’t they? Aren’t they, after all, one of the world’s top authorities on this particular topic?

But, and this is a big but. Too often their answers are overly technical or abstract or detailed in ways that aren’t meaningful to a wider audience. They lapse into what I would call execuspeak. And unless you are a reporter from the Wall Street Journal, an analyst or a direct report, the answers can be, well, boring.

In a world where “basic” cable includes 100 channels, where attention spans are measured in eight-second sound bites (the average length now of a TV news clip) our tolerance for anything not entertaining, meaningfully informative, immediately useful or easily digestible is very close to zero—unless, of course, you are on drugs.

Our executive may have answered the question spot on but because his or her responses lacked a few key vital elements it is doomed to be channel fodder, an easy victim to anything even minutely more interesting… and the airways are filled with minutely interesting programs.

So what are those vital career-saving elements? What will keep the viewer glued to you?

To find out let’s go back to the interview for a moment. At the very end we ask one question about a personal interest and almost without exception the executive lights up, either out of sheer relief or because they finally get to talk about something that’s fun and interesting and something they have a personal passion about. That’s not to say their work can’t have all those elements too. It’s just that they have a much harder time showing it. Sure, there are exceptions, but not as many as you might think. And you know who they are immediately.

As our executives talk about their fishing hobby, or new sports car or grandchild a funny thing happens. They talk to you like a person and not as if they were standing in front of their PowerPoint slides. They smile. Their natural humor bubbles up. They finally become human (in the best and most authentic possible way) and yes, interesting.

Being interesting is one of those vital elements. Unless you are a gifted actor it’s not something you can fake, which is why people who are genuinely interesting are often felt to be authentic presenters.

Now maybe you are thinking (and you wouldn’t be the first). “Well, I can’t honestly think of anything interesting about what I do.”

I understand. Some jobs are quite technical and just trying to explain what you do can be a challenge. You can’t imagine how anyone, short of the people you work with and for, would find what you do interesting, even if you could explain it. And that’s ok. Lot’s of people are in that boat.

But there are techniques for drilling down and making whatever you do (challenge me on this!) interesting and for making yourself, in the process, come across as authentic.

I’ve rambled on long enough in this post and will get to those techniques straight-away next time.

Until then may your light burn bright (at least brighter than whatever else is playing!)

Related posts:

1. The Curious Power of Authenticity
2. Why Online Presentation Coaching Works
3. Young Start Ups: Communicate Your Mantra!

What does it mean to be an authentic communicater?

“You are perfect, just as you are (and you can use a little improvement).”
–Shunryu Suzuki

Over the past 11 years I’ve coached literally hundreds of executives through a surprising and sometimes grueling mock TV interview at the Center for Creative Leadership in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

And the funny thing is, with few exceptions the executives who go through this interview, no matter how much (or little) media training or exposure they’ve had feel that they did terribly.

Even after a sumptuous dinner it’s with a somber, hangman gallows humor that they enter the debrief room that evening to watch themselves and hear commentary from a psychologist, their peers and me.

With the lights dimmed they watch themselves objectively, some for the first time. And just as predictably, what most see is pleasantly surprising. They did well. At the very least they were adequate. They weren’t terrible like they first suspected. And to others they seemed perfectly natural and competent.

Of course, there are always a few imperfections, but they are mostly slight and easily correctible with just a little practice. (More on that in a future blog).

Perhaps you are saying, “Well, yeah. You are working with high level executives. Of course they are going to be good already.” And that is true, but only in part. Most are excellent communicators already–but not necessarily in front of a camera. Most are extremely bright. But they, just like you and me, have a certain trepidation when being filmed for TV.

Maybe it’s because unlike in person, or even a group presentation, there isn’t that sense of audience. There’s no feedback, just the daunting red glare of the live camera light. It’s hard to feel comfortable with an interviewer you just met two minutes ago and who is now asking uncomfortable questions. You have no idea how you are coming across and at this point many businesspeople resort to a kind of executive speak. They retreat to safety, speaking abstractly and in generalities. It’s as if they were addressing a board interested only in a strategic 50,000 foot view of their operations. But even this is fine, as far as it goes.

One of the questions asked, often the last, is a personal question. “Tell me about your new grandchild,” I might say. Or, “What about that scuba trip you just took.” Or, “I hear that on weekends you like to play in a rock-n-roll band at your church?” Inevitably, the veneer of seriousness disappears. A smile forms. And a different person speaks.

Who is that person? And why has he or she been hiding all this time? That person speaks naturally. They laugh. They show enthusiasm and energy. There is an aliveness, a sparkle in their eye. That’s the person I feel most comfortable with. That’s the person I most like.

When I ask how they can bring some of that energy, that passion, to their previous business responses they often look puzzled. “There is no way. I mean that other stuff is serious. There is no room for levity.” True, some topics are serious. Layoffs, disappointing results, these are all worthy of, and may require a serious tone. But that’s not entirely what I mean. I want that other person, the more authentic one, to answer the question in a way that is like one person speaking to another, not someone making a statement or trying to remember what the press release said.

There are ways to create a bridge between those two personas, and to do so with integrity and authenticity. How you can do this using some of the latest research on neuro-physiology I’ll explore next week in part two of this posting.

Related posts:

1. Executive Presentation Training
2. Leadership Communication: Speak with the power of a king
3. Speaking with the Power of a King (part 2)

Authenticity is a big part of what we are all about here at ACT. Effective communication skills can rely on tried and trusted tools and techniques only so far. Without your own unique stamp of authenticity, your presentation may come across as glib, banal, or just plain dull. An audience wants to know who you are among all the facts, figures, strategic directions and calls to action. This means drawing on the part of your personality that people like or admire and using it as the vehicle for your message.

All well and good but according to an article I read today in Wired Science’s Wired.com, it’s as well not to dig too deeply into our psyches to find that inner voice of authenticity, for while rummaging around in the drawers of our personalities we may well encounter the dark side!

In an article called “Why you can’t keep your foot out of your mouth” Harvard Psychology Professor Daniel Wegner explains why it is that the harder we try not to say or do something unfortunate the more likely we are to slip and do it anyway! According to Wegner it happens to many of us “when we’re really striving for something, when we’re under extreme stress or high mental load, that’s when we tend to get these ironic effects.” Like when we’re presenting to an audience or the board, or on live TV for instance!

Someone once asked me if I was ever worried that I might inadvertently say the “F” word on live TV. It had honestly never occurred to me….until that person put the very idea into my head. For the next few weeks I could think of nothing else while on live TV except “Don’t say  “F”, don’t say “F”. I must have looked like a startled guppy during those particular broadcasts. The good news is I never have said the “F” word on TV. The bad news is I have fallen badly to foot in mouth disease on other occasions.

Many years ago I worked on a radio station and promoted local bands by playing their stuff on my show. One of the local musicians only had one hand, but that didn’t stop him being a very capable and creative talent. A few years after leaving the station I bumped into him on the street and asked him whether he still played in the band. “I do” he said. “Great” I replied “It’s always good to keep your hand in.” I wished the pavement could have swallowed me up. That cringingly awful faux pas haunted me for years – to be precise until exactly ten years later when I met him again. Remembering my horrible blunder I willed myself to be extra careful. The conversation was going well until he asked me “I’d like to work at the radio station, what do you think I should do?” To which I replied “Great idea, you should apply, they can always use an extra hand.” I kid you not, it took me fully ten years to make the same exact blunder twice!

According to Wegner’s research these gaffes are fairly common among all of us. So if you can bear to remember them, why not share your less than stellar “authentic” moments with us here on the website.

Go on –  it would make me feel so much better!

Related posts:

1. The Curious Power of Authenticity