Coaching, Presentations
Ingrid Gudenas
The 10 rules of “Audience Logic”

Most people don’t know how to create instant acceptance. It’s rare to see someone who does. When the stakes are high, most think they’re being “logical” when they’re actually relying on a kind of logic that generates too many words. They talk a lot, present too much detail and explanation, believing it’s essential to creating understanding and agreement. Audiences don’t work like that.

Especially at the executive and senior levels. They have their own logic.

To be successful you have to master a different logic. Audience Logic. Audience Logic decides the outcome.

Here are the rules of Audience Logic (especially senior level audiences):

Coaching, Presentations
Ingrid Gudenas
How to win the audience before you say a word

Laura: “You weren’t watching me!”

Me: “No, I could hear you. I knew what you were doing. I was watching the audience to see what change you produced in them.”

Laura had asked me to be there when she presented at an industry conference with hundreds of potential customers. The revenue potential was enormous if she was successful with her presentation. I spent several days coaching her to get her messaging, and the way she delivered it, just right.

The big day came. I was watching the audience like a hawk. I wanted to see the audience reactions from the moment she said “Hello”, all the way through exactly how they looked as she walked off the stage. Were they looking at her with admiration as they applauded? Or shuffling around and checking their phones?

I started watching the audience before Laura even walked on. They were on their phones or talking to the person next to them.  Laura entered the room. I could feel something change in the room as they watched her walk. It was the way she was walking. They could see she carried herself differently.

Coaching, Communication, Causative Communication
Ingrid Gudenas
He didn’t argue. Everything changed.

Many people come to us for training and coaching because they want to create a personal transformation. What surprises, and blows them away, is when they find they’re also creating a beautiful transformation in the other person, whether it’s one person or thousands. That’s where the true power is.

This is Michael’s story, which started when he said:

 

“I am so frustrated! My new boss won’t listen and keeps overriding me. If this keeps up, I’m going to quit.”

Michael was one of the students on the Beyond Persuasion: The new route to extraordinary outcomes course. He chose this “unsolvable problem” to work on as part of the course.

Coaching, Communication, Causative Communication
Ingrid Gudenas
Dreams don’t take a day off

My parents came to America from Lithuania with nothing. They had a beautiful life in the old country, and lost it all when the Soviets occupied their land and took it all away. I gained something infinitely valuable from them as they built a new life here. My parents showed me by example that the only real security we have is our innate ability to dream new realities and create them into being, abilities which nothing and no one can take away without our permission, and which they did so well.

I always think about what I learned from them as we go into a new year.  I’m filled with a feeling that was well expressed by the great poet Ranier Maria Rilke, “And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been.”

This threshold into a new year is a beautiful time for self-reflection, for dreaming of the future.

Coaching, Communication, Causative Communication
Ingrid Gudenas
The moments that give life meaning

I’m a first-generation immigrant. My parents came from Lithuania, right across the sea from Sweden.

We have a beautiful Christmas Eve tradition I think you’ll enjoy hearing about.  It creates a very special moment.

Each person at the dinner table receives a large wafer of unleavened bread and we have communion.

You might have heard of “Holy Communion”, which is different.  That’s when a Priest blesses the wafer and gives it special religious significance.

This Christmas Eve tradition of communion is not religious. If you look the word communion up in the dictionary, without the word “Holy” in front of it, it means:

The sharing or exchanging of intimate thoughts and feelings, especially when the exchange is on a mental or spiritual level. 

You can see it’s something special.

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Touching another human's heart...at work

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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.

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The decision that makes your dream come true

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“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.

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When logical arguments don’t work

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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.

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Misled by hand gestures

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Latisha showed up for Transforming Your Presentation Skills in quite a state. She was very self-conscious. No matter what I said, she kept asking me to coach her on her hand gestures and her words.

“Do you think this hand gesture is better than this one? Do I have more presence if I put my hand on my hip like this?”

On and on. It took Latisha all morning to realize I wasn’t going to coach her on any of that.

It’s a common mistake - I’m always coaching people on this point.

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How to change everything with a single presentation

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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.

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How to avoid the anticipation trap

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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?

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Seeing the real you

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Let’s begin our New Year by talking about Vision.

Vision is all about seeing. The kind of vision that I’m talking about isn’t seeing what’s on the surface. It’s about seeing PAST.

On Day #1 of Transforming Your Presentation Skills, we usually film our students.

As we watch the first video together, we see very different things, the students and I.  They usually hate themselves. This has everything to do with vision. What I do differently is….

Dreams don’t take a day off

When I first started Effective Training Solutions in my 20’s, I was a staff of one. This made me the CEO, which made my mother laugh to no end. After she was finally done laughing, she looked at me, and with great pity and sadness, said, “Oh, honey, why don’t you get a real job?”

As confident as my parents had taught me to be, my parents were terrified that I was going to fail.  But I had learned well from them.

Even if it was all I had, I had a dream, and I knew that nothing else was going to make me happy but living that dream. I knew that you can make any dream come true if you don’t give up on it. And now, I’ve been living my dream, every day, for over 30 years.

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Affinity magic at home

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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.

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The alternative to walking away

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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.

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The single word that can transform any presentation

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George helps sales people close big deals. His track record is impressive. On average, he saves them 30 to 40 hours per sales proposal.  His advice also increases their win rate by a wide margin.

George can look at a proposal or presentation in advance and with 100% accuracy tell you whether it will close the deal.

He has a very simple method. He has a computer algorithm which simply counts the number of times they use the word “YOU”. He compares that to the number of times the sales person mentions their own company.

Proposals where the prospect name is mentioned 10 times for every one time the sales person’s company is named (a ratio of 10:1) are a slam dunk and the deal is going to be closed.

Why is that? Is it because people are egotistical and they want it to be all about themselves? No.

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How to be a hero in a distracted world

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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.

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How one person can unite thousands

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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.

How Ahmet lights up a room of executives

Ahmet: “Are you hungry?

Would you like half my dinner? I’m happy to share it with you. My wife made it and it’s very good.”

It was the end of a long day.  His homemade dinner was steaming on a hot plate, it looked good, and it smelled good. And I was smiling as I said, “It looks delicious!  But no, thank you. I’ll have dinner when I get home.”

Ahmet is a parking attendant in the basement garage of a tall, stunningly gorgeous building with floor-to-ceiling windows and spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay and the city’s financial district.

Everyone he serves has a lot more money than he does. But Ahmet has more heart than 100 people put together and he extends every bit of it as he invites me to share his dinner.

I can’t remember the last time someone made an offer like this to me.

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What to do with someone who never lets their guard down

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We were meeting for the first time. Her face was hard, stern. She had her head tilted back and was looking down her nose at me. Her voice was uncompromising.

“I am the Chief of Staff here. We are responsible for billions of dollars of new product development and I report directly to the Chief Operating Officer.  Everything to the COO goes through me. I make sure everything gets done. I have global responsibility.”

Her eyes challenged me, daring me to top that.

I looked into the heart of this woman and said, “Very nice to meet you. You must have done a lot to get there.”

I wasn’t flattering her.  I was understanding her.

She looked into my eyes and changed into a different person.  Her eyes softened and she smiled very slightly. 

She thought for a moment and said, “Honestly, it’s a tough job, they don’t always listen to me.”

I thought about that for a moment and quietly said, “I can really understand that. That would be tough.”

I was in no rush.  I wasn’t being sympathetic.  I was understanding her.

She looked into my eyes to see if my understanding was true. Being understood was new to her. She saw it was. 

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Transforming Henry: the worst communicator in the room

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Some people think you have to be “born with” the skills and charisma that make a really great public speaker.  Not true.  Let me tell you the story of Henry.

I was invited to give a two-hour talk on presentation skills at a technical conference for a highly specialized professional association.

At the banquet the night before my presentation, I told the President of the association, Steve, that I wanted to line up a volunteer to coach during my talk.  He asked what qualities I was looking for and I said, “Someone who really needs to improve in their presentation skills.” 

Steve enthusiastically told me Henry would be perfect and I said, “Let’s go meet him.”  Well, meet him I did.  Henry hardly took his eyes off the floor while we were talking, and for the brief moments they did come off the floor, they went straight to the ceiling or the wall on our right.  Turns out, Steve interpreted my request as, “Who is the absolute worst communicator in this group?”

Henry didn’t look like someone who liked to be told what to do. I told Henry, “You know, I’m going to be coaching you in front of 300 people.”  He glared at me for a brief moment and said, “What does THAT mean?”  I said, “I’m going to be telling you what to do and you’re going to have to do it.  Are you okay with that?”  He mulled it over a little (looking at the ceiling) and then said, “I guess that’s okay.”  Neither one of us was sure that it was, but with these words we locked in our next day’s destiny.

After Henry left, Steve said, “I hope you’re going to coach him on looking at people!” And then laughed for 2 minutes straight. 

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How to light up the virtual meeting room by subtracting

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Tamara was nervous.  In two days, she had to give a presentation to 400.  Her first really big one.

It was Day 1 of Mastering Virtual Presentations and it was difficult for Tamara to practice without her teeth chattering.

The problem with being nervous is it makes you lose touch with everything good about you. Sometimes to the point where you can’t see anything good about yourself.  The things you tell yourself at these moments tend to be dreadful.

Tamara was doubting whether she could speak without forgetting what to say, without everyone seeing how nervous she was.

There was a lot riding on how well Tamara did. If the Salespeople got excited about the new product, the revenue it would generate would be tremendous. But they had so many other products that they were selling, one new one often didn’t register. Tamara was one of many speakers throughout the day that would all turn into a blur.

As one doubt piled on top of another, Tamara doubted even her own ability to speak coherently.

She was a nervous wreck.

It was a truly exciting product she was going to present. If only the Salespeople understood what it did.

In Tamara’s case, it was not a matter of adding anything to her presentation. It was a matter of subtracting.

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You’ll never get the outcome you want if your face looks like this …

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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.

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How to have Executive Presence, even when you're not talking

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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.

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Curing yourself from unnecessary apologies

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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.

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