During business conversations and presentations, would you like to reduce your filler words, to sound more authoritative and get buy-in faster? You can do it with a technique that actors use when they are preparing to speak extemporaneously.
You already know that filler words (um, uh, so, well, like, you know) rarely add meaning and are usually just a distraction for your listeners. And that they jeapardize your ability to project confidence and commitment. Reducing your use of fillers will help you enhance your credibility and your leadership presence. Borrow this practice technique that actors use:
Set a timer for increasing time periods of time, two or three minutes to start, and record yourself as you speak in extended sentences on a topic of your choice. Choose a business topic that you know well, something you enjoy speaking about (but not your elevator speech or a sales pitch).
As you speak into the recorder, imagine that each word that comes from your mouth is connected to the next one, which is connected to the next one, and so on: the way pearls are connected on a string of pearls. When you feel the urge to use a filler
Stop yourself
Pause
Say the filler silently to yourself
When the timer rings, play back the recording and notice your fillers. Then repeat the exercise, with new topics of your choice.
As you become comfortable with this exercise, increase the setting on the timer, perhaps starting at five or seven minutes. Then, continue the practice until you can speak extemporaneously on new topics of your choice for fifteen or twenty minutes straight, without the use of fillers.
I guarantee: when you practice this on a regular basis, you will find that, over time, you are decreasing the number of fillers that you use. You will sound more confident and more authoritative. And you’ll increase your ability to influence!
When you speak with clients and prospects, would you like to build trust faster? You can do this by projecting warmth and a spirit of caring with a technique that actors have been using successfully for decades. It’s called “Endowment”.
The Endowment technique involves the process of endowing your conversation partners and business audiences with qualities that will help you treat them in a way that builds trust. Rehearse with the Endowment technique with the notes that you have for any business talk. This will help you feel and project warmth spontaneously, even with challenging prospects and clients.
Here are three steps for rehearsing with the Endowment Technique:
Step 1: Think of a person from your life in whose presence you feel cared for, trusted, admired, and respected. This person might be male, female; any age; alive or not.
Step 2: Use the power of imagination before you begin rehearsing aloud. Choose a spot on the wall to place your focus, and in your mind’s eye, “see” that person, right there in front of you. Most importantly, take time to become flooded with positive feelings that you have about this person.
Step 3: As you speak your content aloud, imagine that the person is right there with you, and speak as if you were talking directly to that individual.
Rehearsing with the Endowment technique will have a very positive effect on the tone of voice that you use. The more you practice it, the easier it will be for you to project warmth and spirit of caring. Rehearse with the Endowment technique, and build trust faster.
Would you like your clients and prospects to believe that you will be a true business partner for them? You can help make this happen by sharpening your active listening skills. Active listening helps you project a spirit of good will and project your most positive, professional image.
Very often, it’s wise to listen as your conversation partners express themselves fully, before you present your own thoughts, opinions, and perceptions. People are more likely to agree when they feel that they themselves have been heard!
Here are three steps that will help you listen actively:
Step 1: Blend
Blending is any behavior that helps reduce the differences between you and your conversation partners. The goal is to increase rapport. As we speak, listeners are often subconsciously wondering “Are you with me, or against me?” — so building rapport is very important. Blending will help you do it. This means that you will mirror – and not mimic – your conversation partner’s tone, pacing, volume, facial expressions and posture. Give receptive signals: “Oh, yes, I see, I understand”, and use a lot of head nodding.
Step 2: Backtrack
The goal of backtracking is to show that you are listening and want to understand. When you backtrack, you repeat verbatim your conversation partner’s words. It is important not to paraphrase; use the exact words. This is particularly useful during business conversations on the phone.
Step 3: Clarify
Ask clarifying questions. Your goal is to gather as much information as possible and delay giving your own responses. Clarifying questions begin with the words “why”, “how”, and “tell me about…” There are three main benefits to backtracking: it shows that you are patient and supportive, it helps an unreasonable conversation partner behave more reasonably, and it helps reveal any hidden agendas that your conversation partners may have.
These three steps for active listening will help you project a spirit of good will and caring. Next time, I will share the final two steps to help you listen actively and make it easier for your clients and prospects to believe that you’ll be a true business partner for them!
When you’re in the middle of a challenging business conversation, and you’re certain that your tone of voice has been “above reproach”, what else can you do to increase harmony?
I recently talked with you about the importance of monitoring your tone of voice to increase harmony in challenging conversations. Here are three more strategies to help guarantee your success:
#1: Give positive reinforcement.
We often need to continue having business conversations with people whom we have already experienced to be difficult. Be on the lookout for their positive behavior, and acknowledge it verbally. Whenever you witness behavior that you would like to see repeated, you can say something like, “That’s one of the things I admire about you: your ability to ___”. Identify the positive behavior; praise it.
#2: Interrupt people tactfully when they are shouting, dominating a conversation or meeting, or complaining with increasing negativity.
Calmly repeat the person’s name over and over again. When the person stops speaking, state or restate your own intention in the conversation.
#3: Respond to criticism strategically.
Thank people when they criticize you. When we defend ourselves, it often appears to be an admission of guilt. Instead, you can say something like, “Thank you for telling me how you feel”, or “Thank you for being honest”, or just “Thank you.” “Thank you” is a complete sentence!
When you monitor your communication in these three ways, you’ll help bring out the best in people, increase harmony, and set the stage for greater success in challenging business conversations.
In my last few blogs, I have described the value of applying acting objectives when you prepare to speak for business. Here are some additional benefits that you will experience when you use this technique. Pursuing acting objectives
#1: gives you laser-beam focus and simplifies the process, because it gives you just one thing to think about: what you are doing with your words as you speak
#2: galvanizes your energy toward your listeners; it’s the quickest and most powerful way to project energy, commitment, passion, and poise.
#3: provides a completely organic way to make your voice and physical demeanor support your content. It turns your voice, body language, and content into one seamless, unified message.
When you are speaking in business conversation or making a presentation, this gives you maximum power and delivers to your listeners maximum impact.
Whenever you speak/present in business, it’s very important to keep your focus on your listeners: on what you ultimately want them to feel or do. Nervousness (which is a focus on self) and a preoccupation with word choice or howyou are coming across can jeopardize your power to influence.
Listeners care about one thing: “What’s in this for me?” This is why speakers must always project a “you focus” and why rehearsing in front of a mirror is so dangerous: it trains you to focus on yourself and on how you look (which is often detected by the audience and can project either arrogance or anxiety).
In my blogs, I have presented a theater technique that helps business speakers focus the mind on listeners; the technique is the pursuit of what actors call “acting objectives”. “Acting objectives” are separate from the types of objectives that should be obvious from your content and which you might even articulate to your listeners. Instead, “acting objectives” have one purpose: they are designed to propel your energy toward your listeners and project a “you focus”.
Once you have chosen powerful acting objectives for each “beat” (see my previous blog about “beats”), keep your acting objectives private: they should be your secrets. Have you ever noticed that your secrets hold great power for you? For speakers, this is helpful; we want our acting objectives to hold power over our demeanor; we want them to give us an audience-focused delivery style.
Rehearse the way actors do: rehearse aloud, rehearse often, and rehearse at top energy. As you speak the words of each beat, focus on the underlying acting objective. Your energy and commitment in this pursuit are key. As you speak the words of each beat
Focus on the acting objective (what you want the listeners to do or feel), rather than on the exact words you are speaking
Keep the acting objective at the forefront of your mind
Pursue the acting objective with complete commitment: as if your life depended on it
Finally, always be sure that your demeanor communicates, “My message is important for you, so I love being here with you.”
Pursue “acting objectives” to focus your mind where it belongs: on your business listeners — to engage them fully and increase your power to influence.
You can build your credibility by building listener belief in the way that actors do: Create and pursue acting objectives. An acting objective is an action that lies underneath the words you speak; and ACTION that you take toward your listeners as you speak. It is a specific, active verb; it expresses what you want to do to your listeners; what you want to make them feel or do.
Choose objectives that are personally appealing and for you to pursue, so that you’ll be motivated and project energy. There are three ingredients for an effective acting objective. Each objective should have the following qualities. It should be
a specific, active verb, Directed toward the listener
personal and appropriate to the spoken message and the listener’s situation.
truthful (not necessarily actual, but believable)
Pursuing an objective gives you energy and focus as you speak, because it is a powerful action to take toward your listeners; a powerful action that lies underneath the words. Listeners pay a lot of attention to the actions underneath the words you speak.
Here are some power verbs that might be useful at acting objectives (think, “I wish to __ my listeners”): welcome them; stir their pride; impress them; honor them; warn them; make them laugh, etc.
Keep your acting objectives private; they should be your secrets. The longer you keep a secret, the more power it holds for you. You want your objective to have power of you; to have power to affect your delivery. Keeping your acting objectives private will strengthen your motivation to speak and galvanize the commitment and passion in your voice and your gestures.
Actors write their acting objectives in the margin of the script, right next to the dialogue. Identifying power verbs as your acting objectives for each beat of your presentation will help you organize your ideas, internalize your message, and prepare you for the next step: pursuing your acting objectives, as if you life depended on it!
In order to make choices about actions and identify acting objectives, actors divide the script into units (called “beats”).
Business speakers should do the same. Take a deep dive into the notes for your presentation and divide it into beats. Each beat is a separate topic, smaller than the overall subject of the message (not what you are doing with your words, but what you are talking about).
In the margin of your notes, label each beat: a simple noun or noun phrase.
When you know what each beat is about, you will be ready for the next step: identifying an acting objective for each beat.
Savvy professionals apply acting techniques to help enhance their credibility and gravitas when they speak for business. They know that they need to build belief within the listeners, so they borrow techniques that actors have used for decades. So can you.
Crafted actors spend years perfecting a craft that is designed to build belief. This is why advertisers so often rely upon actors and their craft: they understand that actors’ techniques and performance skills are fundamental to the business of selling any idea, product, or service.
When actors are preparing a role, they make careful choices about what actions to take, to help the audience believe that the make believe situation is real. For actors, it’s all about actions; for actors, actions speak much louder than words.
To prepare, actors create “acting objectives”. These are actions that lie underneath the words – actions they plan to take toward their listeners. This helps actors to be motivated to speak the words that the playwright or screenwriter wrote, and speak them truthfully, authentically, and conversationally.
In rehearsal and performance, actors pursue their acting objectives as if their lives depended on it. This helps the audience believe that the actor and the character are one and the same: that the actor IS the character.
This applies to you when you speak for business for two important reasons:
You want your business listeners to believe something: to believe that you have solutions to their problems, for example. The more rigorously you pursue your actions (your acting objectives), the more completely your audience will believe: believe that you and your message are one and the same; believe that you are your message.
Whenever you are speaking for business, when you make listeners believe, they are very likely to overlook minor shortcomings or mistakes you might make.
Throughout my acting career, and as a professional speaker, I have occasionally neglected to rehearse with the use of acting objectives. Invariably, whenever I have neglected to use this technique, I lost the acting job or failed to engage my business listeners.
Your business speaking/presentations will never be perfect; there will always be something to improve upon and something that you might consider to have been slightly “negative” in your “performance”. Without the use of acting objectives in your preparation, you significantly reduce your ability to make business listeners believe. When that happens, your listeners have little to focus on BUT the negative.
Once you have helped your business listeners believe, you’ve won them over to your side. After that, they will forgive you almost anything!
Would you like your business listeners to be drawn IN when you speak? Would you like them to feel eager to hear what you’re going to say next?
If your answer is YES, you need the power of the pause. Successful business speakers, like good actors, always consider pacing when they are going to speak. The tempo of your spoken word has a strong impact on your listeners and directly influences their level of engagement and influences the way you are perceived. Your pauses are key.
Even the smartest and best listeners need a moment to process a spoken idea. When you listeners can see you, they need time to interpret meaning from a broad palette: your visual delivery, as well as vocal delivery. Your pauses can give them the time they need.
A University of Michigan study revealed that when speakers never paused, they had the lowest success rate in getting listeners to do what they wanted them to do. And the great British actor, Sir John Gielgud, famously said that, when acting Shakespeare, the pauses are the most important moments of the speech! He knew that pauses can be captivating.
Help your business listeners receive the full impact of your message by giving them the gift of time. Pause briefly after each complete thought, to let it “land”. Don’t be in a rush to go on to your next idea. Another benefit of the pause is that it gives you time to get a reading on your listener’s understanding and engagement level. During the pause, breathe deeply and maintain eye contact.
During the pause, your listeners will usually be wondering why you’ve paused and wondering what you’re going to say next. So, your pauses increase listener curiosity and engagement level, and they make you more compelling.
Without the pauses, your listeners may feel overwhelmed by an unmanageable amount of input. They may lose some of your meaning; they may even tune you out.
When you give your listeners time to process each thought, you are respecting their needs, communicating that your message has value, and drawing them IN.
