TEDx Speaker explains public speaking

Welcome to the show, Drina.

It's my pleasure to be here, Abby. Thank you so much for having me.

With pleasure. You know, before we hit record, just for those of you who are listening, uh, Drina and I were discussing how we have a common friend, uh, Lynn Eyre, who appeared in my previous podcast. And I'm so glad because she's such a wonderful lady. And, uh, I'm, I'm just so glad to have you and, uh, explore that we have so many mutual connections.

Absolutely. And they'll only get deeper and wider as you continue to interview some more fascinating people like Linnea Johnston, who— big, big up for our, our girl.

And a big up for you. You've been on, on TEDx, you've written 2 books, you are coaching founders. There's so much more, but I want to dig into it. Tell me about your story and how did you even come up with this idea of The CEO's Voice?

Have you heard of the concept of ikigai?

Yes, I have. And I have that book.

The concept is effectively that you take what you love, what you're good at, what the world is prepared to pay for, and something else, but I forget the fourth. And you combine all of these in a way that really makes you feel like you've brought a sense of yourself, a sense of purpose to the world. Now, while I have been fascinated by communication for as long as I can remember, I've also been fascinated by the voice, by performance, and by how people use language. So when I say, for as long as I can remember, I literally remember my grandmother, who was an English teacher, responding to me when I said to her, Granny, can I have a sweet? Saying, you can, Gina, but the question is, may you?

I love that example because, to be honest, I never paid attention to that difference. I'm not kidding.

And this is the fascinating thing about language. As I have learned and studied And I've spent time on 3 different continents. I've worked with clients on 6 different continents. Having worked with clients all around the world, I've realized that communication is an imperfect science, and it's always going to be imperfect because the very nature of communication is what I say is not necessarily what you hear. There is something that happens in between that communication process. What affects that is our context, our background, our education, our culture, even our religion, our expectations, our beliefs. And so it means that a word, a sentence that is as simple as something like, the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, which is an example that people use to test fonts and to make sure that you can type all of the letters of the alphabet, for example, is highly contextual. You'd think that would be international, but what makes a fox quick? What color is brown? Why is the dog lazy? Why would a fox be jumping over a dog? All of these— and it's supposed to be a very simple phrase. It's designed for something that doesn't have any context or meaning. So over the years of exploring and investigating language and all its nuance, I've become deeply fascinated by how people use it.

A lot of times I hear this from people that as much as they acknowledge how important good communication skills are, they often say, Yeah, but so what? You know, I, I'm— I just want to talk how I want to talk. But I think from what you say, you are going to miss out a lot in life maybe if people don't actually hear what you're trying to convey just because you don't know how to communicate.

100%. If you think about it like learning any skill, if you start at the beginning of your journey and you can do a certain amount of stuff, that's great. You do that. But if you want to become a master of your art, you have to be able to learn the depth and breadth of what you do because it gives you choice. It gives you the ability to decide, I'm going to use this skill set. We learn to talk shortly after we learn to walk. That doesn't necessarily mean that we learn to talk in a way that serves us or serves the people we're trying to communicate to as well as we could.

You've coached so many people and How are you helping them actually?

When you're communicating with someone, it all starts with context. So when I try to help someone communicate, I need to understand what is the context in which we're operating. Often people come to me because they have challenges with specific format or style. I help them by understanding what is the context in which they are preparing for, what is the message that they want to deliver, who's going to be listening to it, and this is the most important question: Why should anyone care?

That is where the gold mine lies.

Absolutely, because you can talk about whatever the heck you want, but at the end of the day, it is not about you. Your audience does not care about you. They care about the problems that they have. They care about how you can solve the problems that they have. They care about the insights that you share only inasmuch as it can affect them. So whatever context I am working with, I will almost always ask people to answer these 3 questions. What do you want your audience to think? How do you want them to feel? And what do you want them to do as a result of the information that you're sharing with them? Think, feel, and do. If you can answer those 3 questions, whether you're writing a paragraph, a LinkedIn post, a blog article, a novel, you can almost always identify whether the message you're giving is serving those 3 purposes: think, feel, and do. And it's fascinating to go through these exercises. Because people don't— they can't often articulate that, and more often than not, they can't articulate the difference between think, feel, and do.

Absolutely. And I've often heard people talk about think and feel, but do is very rare. The actionable bit, it's very rare in the advice that I've seen out there. Or it's sometimes do, give them an action, but the feel part is missing. So no matter what context, Do these 3 elements have to be consistent?

Well, they don't necessarily have to be consistent, but they have to be able to drive towards a point of consistency. So, for example, let's say I am trying to convince people about the best way to grow a tree. I want them to think that it is good to grow a tree. I want them to feel that they want this tree to be happy and healthy. I want them to do— I want them to go and fertilize it. I want them to go and give it more or less water. Now, those are consistent, but it may be that I'm trying to actually shake them up. It may be that I just, I feel like people are overwatering their plants, in which case I want them to think that overwatering is a dangerous thing. I want them to feel that a sense of guilt, a sense of responsibility. Oh, I should not be overwatering my plants, which means I want them to do— I want them to not water their plants. But it's the— yes, the 3 are consistent, but I'm actually trying to juxtapose some elements of those. in order to help change behavior. So when we think about a do that is actually contrary to an existing behavior, you're not actually using the sense of congruence. You're using the sense of juxtaposition to be able to make a point.

Interesting. I'm not kidding. I love that. So when you're trying to convince somebody of the opposite behavior, you have to have that juxtaposition element in the way you communicate as against Um, just having that in a, in a flat format, if that's articulated properly.

Absolutely. If you can get people to agree with you, they will probably love what you say, but it won't necessarily create change.

Could you repeat it again?

If you can continue talking about what people already agree about, they will love what you say. They'll agree with you, but it won't help them change. When we refer back to what's happening in our brains, if our brains process information that already operates with our worldview, We do the same thing we've always done. The people that I work with, senior executives, usually want to create some kind of change. That means in order to create that change, they have to create moments of discomfort, but then they also have to create moments of reassurance. You said earlier that my initial comment was like a TED Talk. Thank you very much indeed. And that's because I am trying to create moments of emotion that are almost like a roller coaster. I want people to feel warm and friendly about me at the beginning, then I want them to feel really happy, and then I probably want to mix things up a little bit and start to challenge them, and then I might want to take them down into a position where they feel really uncomfortable, and then I might say, but it's okay because if you are uncomfortable, there is something you can do to reach that level of comfort again, and by doing that, you can create a new or better version of yourself. It is in fact a diagram that is part of a sales process that I learned many years ago, and it's called the Challenger Sale. And the concept behind the Challenger Sale is that you take people through this emotional journey: warmer, reframe, rational drowning, emotional impact, lead to a solution, solve the problem.

Pretty interesting. I know of a graph. I think it has a very different context, but tell me if it has some similarity. It starts with Let me gather my thoughts. It's optimism which is, um, not justified. I don't remember the term, but it's you being overly optimistic about you being able to achieve something. And then, um, you hit the reality and you realize that you were overly optimistic about it. That leads to— it leads you to the valley of despair because now you just hit the reality and you realize, oh my God, this— entails a lot. And then if you go through that period, then finally you achieve what you want. I think it has a very different context, but I see some similarities.

The graph is the same, and it's entirely possible that CEB, who created the original Challenger-Sail diagram, was using that graph itself. If you think about it, storytelling is not new. It's been around since the dawn of time. If you look at actual narrative structure, there are only 7 stories in the world. I was talking about Pygmalion the other day. Pygmalion is— the Pygmalion effect is the fact that people have high expectations of you, and therefore you rise to meet those expectations. Well, the same story has been used in My Fair Lady, which you probably won't remember. It's a musical about a woman who's in England who spoke in a Cockney accent, who was taught to speak in a beautiful English accent, and therefore rose in society. Well, it's the same story as they used in Pretty Woman. Which is the movie, which you probably may also not have seen, but you can pick a n other numbers of stories where someone learns a special skill that elevates them to a different level. There is no such thing as a new story, but if you look at most story graphs, that journey of I know something, I have to unlearn something, I come back to a point where I can create a new version of myself works because of the conflict. And if you have a conversation with someone and you're not able to address the conflict, and this is important, resolve the conflict in a way that helps people go from comfort to discomfort to a new reality, you can make them like you, but you can't necessarily make them change.

Absolutely. I don't know what the theory behind cognitive dissonance was in psychology, but it was being led in, in the same direction that there is this tension if what you think and what you do— this was more— this had more to do with an individual, but I see what communication influence, the role of communication in the picture here. You know, how do you create that tension for an individual to take an action that you want them to take? And as you said, that wouldn't happen if you're just agreeing to or just reinforcing the same message that they already believe in.

That's a challenge that a lot of speakers have, actually. They'll create a keynote that people will walk away from going, that was amazing, I love it, but they don't change. They don't take action. And as a result, people who deliver the keynote don't necessarily get follow-up requests, or they don't— they may get acolytes who come to them and say, oh, I love that, please can I, you know, interact with you some more? But doesn't necessarily result in anything. And that's because they haven't shaken it up enough to create change. And it is a skill that As a speaker, you need to be comfortable with discomfort. And that is part of the art of training anyone to speak differently. If you think that what you've done is good enough, why would you change? It's a lesson I learned when I was preparing for a TEDx talk I did a few years ago. I thought I was a good speaker. I did not realize how some of the habits that I had were incredibly damaging to the ability of my audience to listen to me. Now you'll notice that I'm using my hands a fair amount today, but I'm also deliberately not using my hands as much as I want to. Which is a challenge for me because the first time I recorded myself on video, and this was in the days before Zoom, before Teams, before any of those online meetings, I had no idea how much I waved my hands in the air. And at one point in time, my husband said to me, Gina, I was in mid-flow, mid-conversation. He said, sit on your hands. So I did. He said, okay, now talk. I couldn't, Abbie. I couldn't talk without using my hands.

That's a good exercise.

It was such a shock to the system, but it was only by switching the context in which I was using that communication that I was able to discover that. And this is often what happens. If you don't like seeing yourself on video, you're not going to watch yourself on video. Therefore, you don't realize the habits that you have. Therefore, you keep those habits your entire lifetime because you don't know. I had to become really uncomfortable watching myself and going, Gina, how could you do that? So that I could realize what I can temper, what I can improve on, and how I can then make myself more clear and more understandable. And every single person who wants to learn a new skill will go through that same journey.

As for the hands, is it— do you recommend not using too many hand gestures, or was it just personal to you that you used a lot and hence you wanted to?

First of all, admit you're super conscious about how much you're using your hands right now, aren't you?

Yes, I just kept my hands like that. You saw in the beginning.

Hand gestures. Are actually really helpful when you're communicating with people because, believe it or not, they give almost a 3-dimensional aspect to what we're talking about. So if you're using your hands in a way that emphasizes your message, they can often create great clarity. Think about it. If you've ever been to a country visiting where you don't understand the other person and the words that are coming out of their mouth make no sense to you, you can often find a way, you know, using hand gestures, just pointing to a context to communicate with each other. So never underestimate the importance of hand gestures. But also, if you think about your performance as a 3-dimensional space, if I am simply talking to you, that's one dimension. If I am talking to you in a monotone, that is another dimension that allows you to idea— to see how important it is to be able to vary your voice. So your vocal variation is another dimension of that. If you add your hands, you can create a 3rd dimension. Now, obviously it's 2D, it's flat, it's on the screen. But you've got audio as well. The audio varies, but someone who is just listening to this will not be able to see my hand gestures. They won't be able to understand whether my body language is open or closed, whether I'm comfortable or not. Hand gestures that enhance your performance or create extra meaning for your audience. Now, some people are very poor at hand gestures and you have to actually teach them to create meaningful, but they can also become a little bit too much. Now, in your context, I don't think hand gestures are distracting for the audience. In my context, when I was using them so much, All you could see was the hand gestures, and they prevented people from actually understanding the message that I was communicating. But hand gestures that make sense are far more relevant and important than hand gestures that don't make sense. Cognitive dissonance. If I'm saying, I want to go out there into the world, I'm using a sweeping, generalized hand gesture. If I say, I want to go out there into the world, well, that hand gesture pointing towards my chest is completely contradictory to the message that I'm saying. That means that I'm going to create cognitive dissonance and confusion in my audience. So your hand gestures must be congruent with the message that you're sharing. Wow.

I think it's very important to understand when to have congruency and when to have that dissonance. I think it's, it's like a tool. So be congruent with yourself, what you speak, how you use your hands. But at the same time, if you have to make an influence and if you have to bring about a change, Practice bringing in the jockster position, as you said.

That's a beautiful summary, Abhi. Yes, I agree.

Oh, I'm glad I got it. Okay, good. So I think the base is set now. That's great. So thank you again for setting the base well. I think my question is going to be now, why, and why do you think people who know how to communicate well, and here we are talking about the corporate world, founders, how do you think that they can win better in life? When I say win, it's them winning deals, them getting more investors to agree to invest in them, having better teams and hiring better people. How does that impact?

Well, there are so many responses to this, but if we come back down to the fundamentals of communication, it is the ability to influence and inform people. Now, founders in particular need to be able to master the art of communication, to take the idea that's in their head and to put that into the mind of someone else. It's almost creating a future image. Now, there is science that actually indicates that when we are engaged in storytelling, our brain cannot differentiate what we're seeing on a screen or reading in a book from reality. In a physical presence, we can, but in that moment, our brains— the parts of our brain light up the same when we're hearing a story or when we're actually living that experience. Which means that a founder's role is to be able to help people imagine with such clarity the people that they're serving, the product that they're creating, the problems that they're helping solve, so that their investors can see that vision too. So if you think about an episode of Dragon's Den, who is more likely to win Dragon's Den? Someone who has passion but who also has clarity and who can articulate their message so clearly that the person receiving that information understands, that they see that vision in their head and they can translate that into reality. So initially, being able to communicate effectively is very important to be able to get funding. At a later stage, as the business grows, communicating that vision is very important to be able to help people, help keep people aligned. So in any leadership context, you are only as strong as the weakest link, which means you need to be able to make sure that everyone in that organization is working towards the Communicating a vision clearly doesn't just help keep people on track, it actually allows them to create their own sense of inspiration and direction to accelerate that track. And that's what great founders do. They are not only conduits of information, but they are also conduits of inspiration. And so according to the research, the ability of a founder to communicate effectively is not merely a desirable trait, but a fundamental determinant of success.

A lot of times when they think about it, it's, it's all about them again. So far, every— even myself, you know, when I thought about it, the question was also framed in a way, right? How can they attract deals? How can they attract investment? How can— but again, as you're saying, if you really want to accelerate the process of anything working in your favor, It has to be some kind of a win-win by actually making people imagine what it is like for them.

And that's really the beautiful art of storytelling. It is the ability to help people create that brain, heart, and gut connection so that they are in alignment, they're in congruence. You feel something, you know something, you trust something. That's not gonna create cognitive dissonance. It allows people to buy into that. And that's why if someone can buy into your vision as a founder, they're far more likely to help you create that. But communication and communication in business has important implications on morale, alignment, productivity. The lack of communication massively decreases people's efficiency at work. It creates distrust. It means that people operate in silos. If you think about any organization you've ever worked with or people you've come across who are operating under contrary instructions, of course they're going to be out of alignment. And that isn't necessarily because they're not doing the right thing by them or the right thing by other people. They just feel and believe and trust that what they're doing is the right thing. They just don't know what the right thing is for everyone. And so as a result, they're operating almost in conflict.

Wow.

Wow.

Hang on. Before I forget, there are so many angles to this conversation. Uh, everything that you say that I'm being able to connect. One of the things that you said was, How? So your brain, your mind, and your gut.

And brain, heart, and gut.

Brain, heart, and gut. What did I say?

Brain, mind, and gut.

Oh my God! I just mixed it up. Isn't it similar to how people talk about the law of attraction? If you have to attract something, there has to be a synchronicity between the three. And it's funny because you apparently, as per this. way of thinking. You know, if you want to attract things, you have to have some kind of alignment between the 3. That helps you attract the things that you want in life. But the same alignment holds true when you want someone else to be attracted to your idea, because you want them to believe it as much as you want your thing to be attracted to you. I'm not sure if I explained it well, but—

I think you've got that. I think that's quite beautiful, and I hadn't thought of it in that context. If you think about it, um, in a more corporate context, Uh, let's think about strategy, goals, and execution. If your strategy is consistent and coherent, your goals are in alignment with that, then people can execute against that. So it's a question of turning vision into reality by taking small steps every single day. So yes, if you think about head, heart, and gut, if someone has a head full of plans, a heart full of dreams, and a gut full of conviction, they're more likely to be able to take a step forward that is going to get them to an ultimate goal. It's not as weird as one would think about. We don't— we can talk about laws of attraction, but you can also talk about what happens in a real business context, which is if you want something, you've got to tell people what you want, you've got to help them get to that stage, and you want to bring them along for the ride.

Absolutely, absolutely. I think law of attraction, the very term, it has It has become kind of a bad word because it has been used in a very superficial way.

Hmm.

But again, as you rightly mentioned, just forget about this term itself. But if you were to think, you know, if I believe with pure conviction, I think in my head that this is the way to go, and I take relevant actions, what's there to stop me? So that's law of attraction. I mean, it's not any philosophy, it's just simple. People have Yeah.

I think one of the problems with the Law of Attraction is that it has been misused in contexts in that people go, I believe, I believe, I believe, but they take no action.

Exactly.

Towards turning that belief into reality. Many, many years ago, I happened to find myself in a church where a minister was giving a sermon about a red bicycle. Okay, why would a minister be talking— a spiritual guide talking about a red bicycle? But his point was this: people will often say to whatever spirit they believe in, God, give me a bicycle, and then they'll do nothing. How will that bicycle manifest itself? His advice was, don't just ask God for a bicycle. Ask God for a red bicycle with a bell and a little ribbon on the front. Imagine yourself pedaling that bicycle. Feel the wind in your hair as you go down the road on that bicycle. And then what'll happen is that that is so clearly fixed in your mind You might see that bicycle in the toy shop down the road.

Yeah.

Well, that's great, but now you've got to get to the bicycle. Well, if you are that motivated and you've got your head, heart, and guts in alignment, you will start to identify ways of solving that problem. And ironically, the same is true in leadership. Help people understand that your product is a red bicycle with a shiny bell and a bow on the front, and then help them identify where your toy shop is, where they can buy it, how they can get involved, how your Employees can create that red bicycle and then go one step further and go, I want that red bicycle. I want it. I want it so much. I'm going to do whatever I can to turn that vision of a red bicycle into reality.

Very well said. And it's very true because if we were to, if we go back to the corporate setup, if you as a leader, if you don't believe in any goal or the steps that one has to take, people will have no faith, and then you cannot expect any results whatsoever. So if you are communicating, there has to be that harmony, there has to be that conviction, otherwise it won't work.

Absolutely. I never thought I'd bring up an example of a, of a Methodist minister in the context of a podcast, but obviously his lesson stuck with me. I learned that long before I was exploring books like The Secret. Which has its place. I think it helps a lot of people identify their goal. It probably helped a lot of people move towards that goal. But it certainly did some damage if people thought that they could merely imagine concept of a red bicycle without actually going out and finding out how they can find the pocket money or earn the, earn the dollars that they needed to buy that bicycle.

Absolutely. I have an alternative book. It's just on my shelf right now. I was looking at it. It's called Reality Transurfing, Reality Transurfing, and it has been written by a Russian quantum physicist. And it's this thick of a book, but he basically explains things from a quantum physics perspective as to how you can achieve things. And it's funny because he tries to become— be as scientific as possible, but he also talks about the 3-element alignment that you were talking about. That got me interested. He was talking about mind, heart, and your gut, and actions to be able to achieve things in life, anything in life.

Well, there you go. If a quantum physicist said it and I said it, then it must be true. It is.

I mean, it works, right? And you're absolutely right. Books— the book The Secret is great, but it has received some, some negative reviews because a lot of people just wanted to wish and wish With no actions whatsoever. But I absolutely love how you've tried to connect this idea to how people can communicate, not just to bring benefits to themselves, but also to the ones around them.

If you think about it, when you're in the middle of telling a story that really is meaningful to you, and it could be that's really exciting for you, or it could be that's really terrible for you, In that moment, we know your brain of your listener cannot differentiate between the clarity of the experience that you're describing and the experience itself. They're empathizing with you. So the art of doing this in a corporate context is being able to help those who are in the context with you, whether you're in a board meeting or presenting to 1,000 people or simply having a conversation one-on-one with a staff member. It is that ability to create that sense of almost perfect connection. And when you leave with clarity, action that heads you in the right direction is inevitable. Of course, what happens after that, it depends on how convincing you were during that period and also a thousand other things about follow-up. But in that moment, I don't know if you've ever had that conversation where time just ceases to exist. We're in a state of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would call flow. I think maybe that's my ultimate goal with helping people with communication is to put them in a moment of flow and put everyone else who's engaged with them in that moment of flow where they're so obsessed by what they're reading or hearing or watching that time ceases.