“I don’t know if it’s possible, but I would like to be captivating.”
This came from Jeffrey who sounded like it would never happen. He was telling me his goals at the start of the presentation skills workshop for senior execs their CEO had arranged. Jeffery is in Finance and no one would have described him as captivating.
Alan, the senior exec over Engineering, said, “Me too.”
The rest of the group all nodded, they wanted that too.
They all did their “Before” videos. They came across as brilliant, smart, experienced. None of them was captivating.
They looked at me hopefully.
By the end of the training, they were each not only captivating, but irresistibly compelling, and even charismatic. They came across as true leaders.
I’m going to talk to you about one of the things they learned that contributed to their transformation…
I was watching the audience. When Arte walked on stage, they were looking at him with mild interest, light curiosity. It was his quarterly All-Hands presentation to 1500 in his division. Arte started:
“Good morning, I’m excited to be here, I hope you’re excited about being here also. Today I would like to talk to you a little bit about…”
By the time Arte got to that point, the audience had lost their spark, they were fading. He didn’t see it. By the time Arte got to the middle of his presentation, even to him something felt flat. He started to talk faster. He tried to inject enthusiasm, but it felt forced. He ended by telling a sea of polite but uninspired faces they had an exciting future ahead.
Arte knew something was wrong, but didn’t know what. He felt a powerful need to break free of something, but had no clue what was binding him and holding him back.
Bryony hung up from the virtual meeting with her boss with a heavy heart and a horrible feeling in the pit of her stomach. She had just gotten the news she dreaded.
Bryony was a Senior Manager who’d requested a promotion to Director. Her boss said, “Well, I can’t promise anything, but I’ll recommend you because you’re doing good work” and had unenthusiastically taken Bryony’s request to her boss. The answer was not only “Not now,” the top boss dismissed Bryony’s future possibilities as well.
Her boss thought she was being helpful when she said,” You don’t really have a chance of getting promoted because you don’t have leadership communication skills.”
Bryony had no idea what she was talking about. She asked what skills were they? The boss had trouble defining them, just that Bryony wasn’t coming across as “a real leader”.
Bryony sat for five minutes trying to figure it out, wondering if she needed to be bossier. It was not her style and if that’s what was required, it was hopeless. She also didn’t see how being bossy was a good thing.
A large corporation had acquired 8 successful companies through their Mergers and Acquisitions. They paid a lot for them. Each one of them had a CEO. Now the CEOs were Senior Vice Presidents, high up in the large company, but no longer the men in charge of everything and everyone.
The CEO had gone through our special virtual Leadership Coaching Program based on Mastering Virtual Presentations. When he saw each one of these 8 new SVPs speak to internal audiences, he cringed. They had good content, but lots of sharp edges and missing key skills in their delivery that would make them great. So, he signed them up for the program.
The 8 men showed up skeptical and arrogant, but willing to give me a chance to see if there was anything good in what I presented. They didn’t think so, but they weren’t rude about it. They were quite pleasant. But arrogant. Especially with each other. Each one tremendously competent. Each one exceptionally accomplished, and the proof was the organizations they had built from nothing and then sold for hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars.
Everything begins with awareness. When you are not fully aware of them, you lose sight of the person in front of you. An invisible wall forms, you unknowingly start talking at them, and your words can’t quite reach them. But when you become fully aware of them, truly present with them, the wall dissolves. You don’t have to try. Connection happens on its own. You start talking to them. Your communication flows naturally, it becomes effortless, and you reach them.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Sometimes humanity is lucky enough to have a single individual who is able to break through all the preconceived notions of despair, hopelessness, and impossibility that overwhelm the rest of the world. They release in humanity the most powerful of forces, the force of love and harmony.
At that moment we see with great clarity what being human really means.
At that moment, we find what we are seeking, what seemed impossible the moment before. We reach that distant shore that we as humanity long for.
The video below is one such a story.
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.”
Leon: “How do you talk to people who don’t want to hear it? When I give them feedback, they immediately get defensive.”
Me: “How do you start the meeting?”
Leon: “I say: I need to give you some feedback.”
Me: “Any other way you start the conversation?”
Leon: “I might say: What we’re doing isn’t working and we need to change. Or I might say: You can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect it to work, that’s insanity. Or I might say: “I’ve told you all this 3 times already but nothing’s happened.”
Leon: Sigh. “I’m just so frustrated. They’re just not open to anything.”
I know very, very, very few people you could walk up to and say any of these things to who would happily listen to you. If you want to test how to make someone immediately defensive, just try walking up to someone and saying, “Is it okay if I give you some feedback?”
Or if you’re really feeling adventurous, you could see what happens when you say, “You know, you really need to change.”
The only other way I know to make them even more defensive is to say, “I don’t want you to get defensive when I tell you this …” That’s guaranteed to create an instantly defensive reaction from even the nicest person.
On the other hand, it’s pretty easy to initiate challenging meetings and difficult conversations and get them rapidly rolling in a positive direction when you understand that the most powerful human motivating force is purpose.
Sean was one of several hundred employees in a division of a very large corporation. He reported to a Manager who reported to a Director who reported to the Vice President. Sean “commanded” no one.
The Vice President issued a directive to Sean’s division that, after being in place for two weeks, was extremely unpopular within the ranks. Despite major grumbling, the division Managers told their people that they understood their frustration, but to try to deal with it best they could.
Sean was so bothered by this directive, he was seriously thinking of quitting a job he loved and looking for another one outside the company.
Since he had just taken Causative Communication, he used what he learned to ask for a meeting with his Manager. It took COURAGE for Sean to approach her on this hot topic.
As he suspected, the Manager knew people were unhappy, but it wasn't totally REAL to her how bad it actually was. It often happens that the other person has some idea of the situation, but it's just a glimpse and not the full force of it, it’s not as REAL to them as it is to everyone else. They don’t really get it.
Carl was walking out the door. Over his shoulder, walking away from me as he was talking, he was tossing off a goodbye, “Thanks a lot! I’ll be in touch!”
Carl had just completed an intensive 3-day Causative Communication class. In just 2 sentences he had forgotten everything he learned. His tossed-out comments sounded insincere, or at best, meaningless, just something you’re supposed to say because you’re leaving.
I said, “Carl, do you have another minute?” He said, “Sure!” Turned around and came back to me.
I said, “Carl, you’ve already lost everything you learned.”
Carl looked thunderstruck. He wasn’t expecting that.
There was a long silence as he looked into my eyes. I said nothing. Then he said, “Oh wow. You’re right.”
Then he said, “I can see I’m really going to need to deliberately and consciously practice this.”
Knowing Carl’s commitment to becoming a truly great communicator, I told him what I’ve told many of my students: “If you really want to master communication and achieve its highest strata of excellence, you’ll need to apply what you learned in every conversation, every single day.”
Then Carl said what I’ve heard from many: “I’ll keep practicing and it will become automatic.”
No, it won’t.
And you don’t want it to. That was the problem that Carl was already having. Too many things on “automatic”.
The members of the senior leadership team of a large Silicon Valley company were good people, they were just adversarial. Facts were instantly disputed and ideas were challenged and criticized. Their weekly meetings turned into antagonistic confrontations, they were unpleasant and rarely ended well.
The General Manager had a tendency to become overbearing and repeat himself to the point where the team tuned him out.
They were the kind of meetings that left you feeling bad for a couple of hours after they were done.
Two of the nine on the team attended a Causative Communication workshop. Neither one of them was particularly liked or respected by the others (no one was) at the time they started the workshop. Neither one had any authority relative to the others. What they did have going for them was an eagerness to create change.
In the next senior leadership meeting after the training, they both did something they’d never done before, that no one on the team had ever done before.
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