I was watching a video of a live presentation by Mark, the CEO of a major corporation with more than 40,000 employees. Mark was visibly and painfully uncomfortable. Worse yet, he was making a fool of himself.
Mark had heard about me and reached out with a request that I coach him on his presentation skills. He had his Chief of Staff send me a couple of his recent videos to watch in advance “to see what he’s doing wrong”.
Mark knew something was clearly wrong. In our initial conversation, Mark told me, “The more feedback I get, the worse I’m getting. I need someone to straighten this out for me. I may not be the best public speaker in the world, but there’s no reason I need to be the worst.”
I started our first coaching session wanting to understand what was going on in his mind. I asked Mark, “What were you trying to do up there?”.
Mark answered, “I’ve been given feedback that as a CEO I need to be vulnerable, and that I also need to be more passionate. That’s what I was trying to do.”
I asked, “What does that mean? Vulnerable and passionate?”
Mark looked at me, and with great pain in his eyes said, “I have no idea.”
Well, there you go. Mark was trying really hard to execute something that was completely incomprehensible and confusing.
I hear the words, passionate and vulnerable a lot in my coaching. They are very trendy.
That doesn’t make them valuable.
Whenever I ask people to define these terms for me, they always burst out laughing and say, “Well, I don’t know if I can actually define it.”
I can assure you: If you can’t define it, you can’t do it.
When you tell people to “Be passionate!”, they don’t know what to do. When you tell people to “Be vulnerable”, they don’t know what to do either.
In coaching, and especially for giving any feedback, precision terminology is one of THE most important elements for success. This is also very important to you personally if you are trying to develop greater ability in ANY area of your life – you must be able to define the exact skill you need to work on to take yourself to the next level of extraordinary.
The words passionate and vulnerable are, for all practical purposes, completely useless when it comes to public speaking.
The word passion literally means the state you are in when emotions overpower your reason. It came from the Greek word pathos meaning to suffer.
Simply put, passion is being overpowered by emotion. Overpower means to take over your power.
NO ONE communicates effectively when their emotions overpower their reason.
Passion is not what makes a person effective. Telling someone to be passionate will leave them confused. “Trying to be passionate” won’t feel right or natural and will make them struggle.
The truth is, many people (probably including you) ARE passionate about what they’re talking about. All of my clients are.
You don't need to learn how to be passionate, that's already in you.
What you do need to learn is how to communicate effectively so that your audience becomes passionate.
It’s not how passionate the speaker is! If you come out of a meeting and everyone is saying, “What a passionate speaker!” it’s not really such a compliment.
When they say, “What a passionate audience you created!” … now, THAT’S a compliment.
I didn’t try to make Mark passionate. I coached him on how to create a passionate audience. He was so relieved.
Then I told Mark that the definition of vulnerable is: susceptible to (likely to happen) physical or emotional attack or harm, or being in need of special care, support, or protection because of age, disability, or risk of abuse or neglect.
He didn’t believe me and needed to check the dictionary himself. And there it was. I wish you’d seen the look on his face!
When I asked him if, now that he knew what the word meant, he wanted to be vulnerable? His answer was (I hope I don’t offend you), “Hell, no!”
This particular term “vulnerable” came about because executives were presenting like corporate robots and their messages were cold and insensitive. They were the products of highly paid, but really bad script writers.
Vulnerable is the wrong word. Anyone who wants you to be vulnerable wants you weak. Not such a great idea for a CEO.
The right word was affinity, which is how much you like someone, it’s a feeling of liking the other person or persons. What Mark needed was this coaching instruction: What would you tell the one person you really care about? And how would you tell them?
Mark could easily do that. And he found it much easier to communicate to a large audience when he let himself feel how much he cared about them, rather than trying to impress them with what kind of a CEO he was.
Mark also found it easy to be genuinely impactful when he felt that flow of incredible energy that comes from really connecting with the audience, and receiving the intense group energy surging back to him.
When you use precise and accurate terminology in coaching, or in developing your own skills, it becomes easy. It flows from you very naturally. That’s one very important signal that you’ve found the right words.
At the end of his next presentation, they did not call Mark passionate or vulnerable. They called him charismatic.
You can’t tell someone to “Be charismatic!” Charisma is a natural byproduct of doing everything else right.
Charisma is something every single person has within. It’s not a special gift given only to a few, although it is true that only very few actually find the path to discover their charisma and express it.
Mark wasn’t “broken,” he was just led astray. He had bad information. Once we fixed that, everything shifted.
And that is why I love what I do. Because I get to be the witness of transformation. I get to see someone like Mark finally break free from the obstacles in his way and release his true power to be causative.
This is a power we all have. And seeing that activated throughout humanity is the reason I wake up in the morning.
Be the cause!