Victoria’s fate for the next five years hung on what happened in the next 90 seconds.
Those 90 seconds would shape her future for the next five years, the future of her team, the future of the organization and very possibly the future of the industry.
Victoria wasn’t nervous. She was calmly enthusiastic. This is what mastery looks like.
Victoria’s coaching sessions had prepared her. Good coaching does that. It builds your confidence and makes you fearless. Real confidence is built on solid, consistent demonstrations of competence.
Being close to Silicon Valley, we have had many senior executives send engineers and other technical leaders from various disciplines, including finance, to us for coaching on their presentations to leadership. Their biggest complaint is also their top goal for the people they send. They phrase it like this: There’s too many details in their presentations.
What they mean is, too many unnecessary details. It drives executives crazy. And engineers are at a loss as to what to leave out.
There is a big disconnect between “engineering logic” and “executive logic”. I’ll explain what that is.
A team can be good when it has a star, or even two stars. But it’s nothing compared to a unified, seamless team when you are ALL amazing. This kind of team creates a juggernaut of exhilaration as it makes a common purpose real and broadly felt throughout the whole organization.
It’s a joy to be a star. It’s an even greater feeling of elation to be part of a dream team. You walk that much taller, hold your head up that much higher, knowing that to your left and to your right, your compadres are doing the same.
Dream teams are not the product of some mysterious luck or having a few stars. They’re shaped by practice. And they can happen fast.
Today is Administrative Professionals Day when we celebrate the unsung heroes of the corporate world. I’ve been working with them for decades and my admiration for them is boundless.
This article is about an extraordinary one, Debbie Gross, the author of The Office Rockstar Playbook: How I Leveled Up as an Executive Assistant and Helped My CEO Build a Multibillion-Dollar Company.
When you Google, “How to handle stage fright”, you’ll find many strange suggestions, some from very prestigious sources. I saw a video posted by a respected MBA program where the solution presented is finding a friendly face and only talking to them. Audiences hate that. Another impressive source posted a video demonstrating “Power Poses” where you have one hand on your hip and another on a chair. Looks ridiculous when you actually do it. Another respected source recommended drinking orange juice. Makes me wonder if he has investments in the orange juice industry.
No mention of a root cause.
Philip said, “I’m already getting standing ovations when I speak at conferences. Not sure what you could teach me that would make me better.”
He wasn’t challenging. Just matter of fact.
I asked, “Are you getting them at the end of your presentation?”
He said, “Of course!”
I asked, “Do you also get any standing ovations during your presentations?”
Philip looked puzzled, “No.”
Pause. “Is that possible?”
It was a virtual meeting. Most people think the word “virtual” means “Far away; using technology” and definitely “not as good as in person.” (I hear this all the time.)
However, if you look up the word “virtual” in a good dictionary, you’ll see that it means “Creating the power of real without actually being real”. I want to let that sink in.
In other words, virtual reality is different than actual reality, BUT when it is done well it has the power of actual reality. In other words, it creates a new reality.
When people in the audience come to you afterward and tell you, “You really helped me!”, they’re saying that you are valuable to them.
Being valuable will do more for your career than anything else. It’s measured by how much you help. Think about the most valuable people in your career. They’re not the ones who dazzle you. They’re the ones who help you.
Someone asked me what makes my coaching different. I’m going to talk about one thing I do, and one thing that all of our incredible ETS Coaches do, that makes it extraordinary. My purpose in telling you is perhaps knowing what I focus on will help you focus on this too as you go to your next meetings and give your next presentations.
Many communication coaches and programs coach the visible: the hand gestures, the voice inflection, emphasis on certain words, body language, the slides, the smile. The visible, physical mechanics.
I coach the invisible. The invisible is manifested, and others can see it, but what I coach is not visible.
I coach: Being there, presence, affinity, attention, awareness, interest, intention, creating understanding, command, dignity.
“We don’t need a reorganization.”
That simple sentence changed the fate of hundreds of people.
Bill came to me for coaching, but not with high hopes. His first words were, “I’m interested in anything you have to teach me, but I want you to know that I’m realistic and I know that there are many situations where communication doesn’t work.”
I’ve handled many difficult situations. Many difficult conversations. And I’ve spent my life helping others do the same.
I’ve seen people turn their losses around rapidly. I’ve also seen people who take a long time to recover.
The fastest, simplest and most effective way to turn around a bad situation, a bad conversation, or a bad relationship is this.
First, face the situation as it is. Don’t get drawn into “How it should have been”.
If someone is being difficult and you can walk away and not deal with them, I'm all for it. If you can go around them, or above them or go somewhere else, why waste your energy dealing with a difficult person if you don’t have to?
But there are times you can't choose to end that relationship, even though you may be able to walk away for a couple hours.
Sometimes you have a difficult boss, but no other job. Until you find another job, you can't afford to walk. Sometimes it’s immediate family that you can’t leave. What do you do then?
This article is about how to make other people’s faces light up when they see you.
At my farmer’s market on Sunday, the farmer where I buy broccoli every week, a man who is normally sullen and glum, lit up and started grinning when he saw me walking toward his vegetable stand.
Why did he do that? Because spectacular communication is rare in his life.
The staff of a senior executive in a major corporation complain he never makes time to meet with them. After my first meeting with him, he told me to always stop by his office to talk when I’m in the building. His face lights up when he sees me and he always makes time. He gives me his full attention. Our impromptu meetings often stretch to 30 or even 45 minutes.
Why does he do that? Because spectacular communication is rare in his life.
A Vice President known for never answering his emails always answers mine within hours.
Why does he do that? Because spectacular communication is rare in his life.
I haven’t even begun to tell you the results my clients get. Every day I get emails from our students about what happens when they apply the Communication Formula. They get equally spectacular results.
Real communication leaves you and the other person feeling really good.
I’ve worked with professionals and executives of large corporations for over 30 years. They are used to feeling tense. It’s become normal. Feeling completely comfortable is not normal. Being relaxed is not.
That’s how being slightly tense, or even very tense, becomes habitual. And they’re surrounded by others who are also slightly or very tense. So they’re swimming in a sea of uninspected “normal”.
One of the foundational, skills students gain in the Causative Communication course is the ability to BE THERE COMFORTABLY. This sounds insignificant to the untrained ear. Yet, without this ability as a base, no other communication skills function.
This is illustrated by an email I received from one of our students, Mariela. Mariela has a “Lioness” boss who crushes the spirit and destroys the self-esteem of all.
Mariela emailed me this after the course:
Sometimes my students write the best articles. I think you'll be inspired by this success story.
I've worked with MANY people who wanted to get promoted. They have tremendous technical expertise and many other abilities and fine qualities. The key differentiator that always ensures true recognition and significant success for them is gaining the ability to communicate at the high level of skilled communication that their lives require.
One gentleman, whose name is Krishna, perfectly illustrates this.
What happens between childhood and adulthood that makes adults so uncomfortable and tense about looking into each other’s eyes?
This is a question I ask myself often. In our Causative Communication Live! Workshop, I help the grown ups restore their lost ability to really LOOK at another person. And I always wonder how we let ourselves get so mixed up with so many confusing ideas about it.
Worrying about what others are going to think, fear of their reaction, being excessively careful not to ruffle feathers … All of these cripple communication.
I can't tell you how many times clients come to me and say, “I just have to put up with it for now because I don’t want to shake things up right now. I’m just going to let it go for now.” And they suppress their own communication and chance for success. “For now” turns into a very long time.
If you need everyone to agree before you stand up to speak, you’ll never make anything happen.
Most people don't know how to truly connect with others as themselves. There's always something holding them back, some self-consciousness, a feeling something is “missing”, or something they put between themselves and others to protect them.
Often this is manifested when you see presenters trying to connect with their audience through their PowerPoint slides. You can see the trouble they would have if you took the slides away from them. They’d feel exposed, vulnerable, unsure.
Whether it’s slides, a beautiful body, or some attitude a person assumes because they think it makes them impressive, it doesn’t make any difference. The REAL skill is connecting directly as yourself.
This result isn’t something you achieve by improving your “corporate presentation” skills. It’s only available when you’re willing to step beyond what you see everyone else doing and do something very different.
This isn’t a journey about hand gestures or tone or how you make your slides…this is a journey about connection.
Ayansh felt powerless. His promotion had put him in an extremely contentious engineering team. They didn’t discuss each other’s ideas, they shredded and destroyed them. No one listened. They were all sneering. Each one showing off how brilliant they could be, and the way to do that was to see the others go down in flames.
They were brilliant. But it was all being wasted.
What a group of successful execs will learn in Causative Communication, are the rules. Not the rules that I dreamed up, but the rules that are common to all human beings, crossing every border reaching every culture, every generation, rules that determine the winners and the losers, timeless rules deeply baked in to human nature, powerful rules that will still be active 500 years from now.
The first one they learn is unexpected. It’s foundational.
As I was teaching the concept of affinity, Bridget very bluntly told me she doesn’t have time for it. I told her that I understood, and with her busy schedule she certainly doesn’t have time to do anything additional that would add time. But I explained to her that affinity is not something you do in addition, it’s HOW you do what you’re ALREADY doing. It doesn’t take any time.
Liza: “I’m leaving you.”
Matt: In shock. “Oh no you’re not.”
He was at home in Silicon Valley. Liza was calling from Boston. She was in a hotel room with the man she was leaving Matt for. She was on a business trip, but now she was telling Matt she wasn’t coming home. Matt just found out that their affair had been going on for months.
He knew things had gotten distant between them, and he felt responsible because he had been working too hard and had stopped really being present in their marriage. “I wasn’t there for her.” He suddenly realized what a mistake that was. But he loved Liza and he didn’t want her to go.
Matt was on the phone and thinking fast. He felt he was losing everything, his mind was a blank. He had just done Causative Communication and the only thing he could remember was intention.
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