Show Notes
Hey there. Bart queen here. Welcome to the remarkability Institute today. Guys, I want to take a very strong look at one area around communication in that physical delivery on how you come across, whether you're doing something virtually or doing something face to face. In this particular area. If I could write the script, if I could have my way, if I wave my magic wand, I'd make sure every 17 and 18 years old got this kind of information.
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00:02:14] Guys, I truly believe it would change how they do their college presentations, for lack of a better term. I truly believe it would change in that first job interview when someone says to them, why should I hire you over everybody else? And I, I believe it would begin to change how they're going to interact with their spouse or significant other whoever they're going to spend their lives with.
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00:02:38] One of my famous sayings, or one of the one of the things I like to repeat, one of the things that are important to me is this very simple concept that people buy what they see before they buy, what they hear, that people buy what they see before they buy what they hear. Now, if we. Embrace that concept.
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00:02:59] Then what we say and how we say it has to match. So for those of you who are parents out there, I want you to imagine that you're looking at one of your children, especially when they're younger, and you say, did you do that? And you can envision your son or your daughter putting their head down, kind of scuffing their feet and saying, no mom, no dad, I didn't do that.
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00:03:24] And you can look right at them. I know you are guilty. I know you did it. That is a great example of what you say and how you say it has to match. Maybe you've had the experience where you've met someone, and you went up to shake their hand, and you reached out, and you said, very nice to meet you, and they looked at the floor and said, yes, nice to meet you as well.
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00:03:52] That's another great example of what you say and how you say it has to match. The challenge here is when they don't match your credibility, and your trust factor goes down. The classic example I see, especially in the corporate world, if someone is in a small group meeting, they've done a presentation, they'll say, now are the, are there any questions?
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00:04:19] And when they say, are there any questions? They, too, they take two steps back if you think about it; I'm sure you've seen that situation play over and over and over again. Or maybe by chance, the presentation is over. An executive in the room raises their hand and asks a question, and the person who is about to answer it steps back two or three steps.
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00:04:43] I can promise you, even though they don't realize that they're stepping back, the visual that the audience sees says this is what it says to them. They're on the run. They don't believe what they've been telling us, and they're not confident in what they're telling us. This very simple concept of what you say and how you say it has to match is powerful.
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00:05:08] People buy what they see before they buy what they hear. Guys, I know you've been in a situation where someone's stepped up front, and you went, Hmm, boy, something about him or her. I'm not trusting. I do not like it. I'm concerned about whether we want to believe that people judge a book by its cover or whether we want to accept that concept.
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00:05:30] It's true. As soon as you and I walk into a room to do something, people will begin to look you up and look you down, and they get an assessment about you. They're already going to begin to say, wow, this looks like it's going to be good. I'm a little concerned. I trust them. No, I don't trust them.
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00:05:51] They're going to make all those perceptions before you ever start. So if you happen to be at your desk, you happen to be at your house, you're seated. You got a pen and paper in front of you. I want you to write that simple concept down to people by what they see before buying what they hear. I want to be able to build on that idea.
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00:06:14] Now, as we walked through this podcast today, guys, I'm going to be giving you a high-level overview of what I call the D delivery mechanics, the pieces that makeup everything that you need to think about when you're delivering a message. Now that's whether that's face to face or that's virtual. So realize if you're doing something virtually, they do not see some of these things, but these other mechanical pieces will come through in the way you carry yourself.
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00:06:43] They're going to hear this through your voice. If you're face to face, I want you to embrace this idea. Every single thing counts, which you don't think counts, counts, which you may not have worried about, may count to one of your listeners. Now. I'm not asking you to change who you are. I'm not asking you to change your choice of clothes.
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00:07:09] I am asking you to think through each one of those pieces and make sure that there isn't anything that you're doing that's a distraction. If there's something that's a distraction, I want you to think about getting rid of it. Just this week, I led a program around virtual communication, and one of the things that I highlighted in this virtual perspective is just for us guys, what is your shirt look like so I can incur and encourage you enough in those situations.
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00:07:43] Get rid of stripes and get rid of plaids. When it comes across on the video, sometimes it can seem like those things are moving, and then it can be a distraction for you. For you ladies, many times, you may wear a lot of Jangles or bracelets on your arm, and every time you took your hand up or take your hand down, you'll get that jingling sound.
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00:08:05] I'm not asking you guys again to change anything about what you do.
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Bart Queen: asking, I'm asking you to build awareness around what may be a distraction. So let's take a couple of things in mind. Realize that people buy what they see before they buy what they hear. Big principle to think about. And number two, get rid of any of those distractions that may cause your listener, whether you're virtual or face to face, to not pay attention to what you're saying.
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00:08:35] Now, as we get into the area of the make of the mechanics, there are a couple of things, or let me give you a list of those things that I want us to build awareness around. Number one is your posture, whether you're standing or you're seated. Number two is physical movement. Whether you're standing or seated, whether you're face to face or you're virtual, it matters.
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00:09:00] I contact one of the probably the most important skill I want you to truly embrace and probably make a paradigm shift around from there, your physical gestures, what you're doing with your hands, your facial expressions, what you're doing with your face. You're smiling and realize that people can hear a smile on your face, which leads us to the last big component around your vocal variety.
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00:09:28] Now, vocal variety has five core components to it. There's the rate you speak fast, low; there's volume, loud, soft, there are your God-given pitch and tone. Just how your voice sounds, there's influxion, which is up, down in your voice, or maybe some of you might call that modulation, and then the power of the pause.
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00:09:56] This is your ability to give a sense of a sound bite. This is your ability to get rid of your ums and ahs. It may take us two different sessions to get through this, depending on how we break it apart. So if we only get through half of it, I want you to realize, look for that second podcast on your delivery mechanics and make sure you pick up the 72nd half.
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00:10:22] So guys, let me get into that very first one around posture. Posture is the number one skill that communicates confidence before you open your mouth. It is the one thing where people will look you up and look you down and get a sense of how you come across. I want you to be perceived as confident before you ever open your mouth posture.
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00:10:50] I would also believe it is one of your four power skills. This one scale will separate you from everybody else. Now, as I walk you through this, if we were doing a typical three-day program, or I was coaching you for a Ted talk or a keynote speech. I ask you to do this, you're going to go, Bart, this is uncomfortable, so I want to bring you back to a principle that I taught you in one of our other podcasts, and that was this idea of disparity.
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00:11:22] I'm going to ask you to do things. You're going to go, Bart, that's way too uncomfortable. I don't like that. That makes me feel stiff. But here's the disparity piece. Your listeners get to go, wow. They look confident. They look open. So your rule of thumb is this, do not go with how it feels. Go with the impact it creates.
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00:11:46] Guys, if you go with how it feels, you're never going to embrace these skillsets because they're uncomfortable. It's a skill set. So think about maybe learning a sport, and the coach was asking you to do it over and over again, and you went coach. That just doesn't feel right. And the coach eventually made you do it so many times that it started to feel natural.
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00:12:10] For those of you who are musically inclined, maybe learning a musical instrument. You went through the same thing. I remember my freshman year in college, trying to learn how to play the guitar. I practiced and practiced until my fingers bled, and I finally said, I quit. I can't do this. I never pushed past that pain enough to embrace the idea of making it feel like it's more fluid.
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00:12:36] Now for some of us, that curve as long, and for some of us, that curve is short. Every single one of these skillsets will be different for every single person. Now, if I had you in a three-day program, I would get you up on your feet. I'd put everybody in a big circle, and then I would get you to freeze, and we would start to look at some of these postures.
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00:13:02] The first posture we're going to kind of take a look at is typically a man's posture. Now, guys, we tend to stand with our feet more shoulder with a military background sports background. The other structure or the other posture? IC, is that what I call the GQ pose? One hand in a pocket, you throw out kind of a leg.
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00:13:26] You look like you're modeling for Nordstroms, JC Penny's, or Macy's. Those are the typical, bigger postures I see from men. Women do something a little bit different. They'll throw out a leg, put a hand on a hip, tilt ahead. It's what I call more of a girly pose. You'll also see women a lot of times for the across the Lake, right over each other, put their feet side by side, and they'll stand cross-legged.
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00:13:56] Or I see both a lot of men and women who will stand with one leg out, and they'll put their foot upon a heel. Now I see the majority of this. A lot of time, guys, when women, when you ladies are wearing your nice heels because your foot hurts, you'll rest your foot up on that heel to take the pressure off your feet.
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00:14:19] What ends up happening in that situation? You end up swiveling your foot and moving it, and it becomes a distraction. So if you'll do me a favor and start paying attention the next time you're in your corporate meeting, you're at a conference, you're watching someone present. Notice their posture. Now, you may have noticed it before, but you weren't able to articulate it.
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00:14:44] Now, with each one of these postures, I give them just silly names so that you can begin to identify it, and you can begin to see it. The posture I want you to take. And this is going to feel uncomfortable. Guys, I want you to put your feet hip-width apart. Now, basically, for most men, depending on your size, is two to three inches apart.
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00:15:12] For you ladies, it could be anywhere from two to probably a half-inch apart, depending on your God-given structure. If your more to the taller side, more to the lean side, you may see that you can bring your feet a little bit closer together. For those of us who are what I might say thicker in our body structures like myself, you might have to pull your feet a little bit apart.
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00:15:44] The second piece to this posture is where everybody fights me the most, is I want you to relax your arms just to your sides. Now the best way to do this, if you have one of those full-length mirrors, if you're at home somewhere, stand in front of that mirror and notice two to three inches apart with your feet and relax your arms to your side.
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00:16:07] Now, when you're doing this, if we were doing this in the circle environment that I talked to you about, what you're going to see is you start looking at your colleagues. You're more focused on their face, then you're more focused on their body, but you'll get a lot of folks who want to bring their hands up and put them hands folded dead center, or you'll see some people who drop their arms, and we'll do what I call the fig leaf, where it's directly in front of them.
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00:16:34] Dead center. If you'll do that, what you'll begin to notice is that's where the focal point is. Your hands become the focal point instead of your face. If you'll come to this posture two to three inches apart, arms relaxed to your sides; it is what we call a ready position. So for those of you who are sports-minded, if you'll think about it, no matter what sport you've got, you have a ready position.
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00:17:03] You have a starting position. You don't get stuck in that starting position. But that's where you start. Now. I want you to gesture, do whatever you want to do with your hands. And I want you to move. If you're up on a stage, move from point a to point B. If you're in a conference room, go from a seated position to the whiteboard.
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00:17:26] Go up to the PowerPoint slide. I want you to move, and I want you to gesture, but I always want you to come back to what we call that ready position. That ready position is neutral. It is neutral. Now, a lot of folks, a man especially will fold their arms at you, okay? This makes you look defensive.
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00:17:51] The majority of the focus by your listener, whether you're seated or standing, should be at your face. Now guys, just listening to this can be difficult because this is a skill set, and this is where I believe behavior change is so important. You have to be able to practice. It's that repetitive, do it over and over again.
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00:18:18] And this is where in our three-day program, you get that behavior change, and you get that skill development. It is critical to your success that you get that hands-on coaching. I remember when I first learned this, I thought, Oh my gosh, I can't even move. And I related it to the very first snow skiing lesson I took.
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00:18:41] I was probably 26 years old, and I remember taking a lesson. I remember the ski instructor saying, okay, Bart, bend your knees, great. Grab your poles, super Ben forward, excellent. Point your toes inward. And then he said, all right, all I want you to do is go down the bunny slope. And I remember looking at him and saying, I can't even move from this position, let alone do what you're asking to do.
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00:19:10] That's how cumbersome this can feel, but I can't encourage you enough. You have to fight past it. So as you think about the skillset, here are a couple of ways I want you to practice. When you're standing in front of your sink in the bathroom, and you're shaving, you're brushing your teeth. I want you to go to this ready position.
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00:20:12] When you're standing in line at the grocery store, I want you to go to this ready position. When you're standing in line at the ATM, and you're trying to get some cash out of the machine, go to this ready position. When you're standing in the hallway talking with your friends or your colleagues or the people you work with, go to this ready position the next time you go out in a social event, as you're standing, having a cup of coffee, a glass of wine, cold beer, whatever it may happen to be.
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00:20:38] Guys, scan at the audience, look at the people in the social environment, and just look at their posture. Notice how people are standing now, I can promise you, nobody's going to walk up to you and go, wow, John, your posture is outstanding. They're not going to say that. They're going to walk up to you and say why you look confident.
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00:20:59] You look like you're ready to go. They will notice something about you, but they will not be able to articulate what it is. That's an awesome thing, but if you go by how it feels, you'll never embrace that idea. It took me forever to embrace that skill set. But now, guys, I've been sending that way for the last 30 years, and if I do something different now, that different posture is what feels uncomfortable.
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00:21:31] Now, I mentioned this briefly that your posture is the first of your power skills. This is the one thing that will make you come across. The most powerful to begin with. Before you open your mouth,
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00:21:44]I want to make sure that this becomes one of your strengths, and it may take some practice just like riding a bicycle, but once you find that you can do that, guys, you will find that this is the most comfortable thing you can do. Now, that's kind of an overview of this idea of the ready position of your posture.
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00:22:08] Now, I want to link that with this idea of movement.
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00:22:13]Movement also is part of your power skills. Now, eye contact drives movement, but let me give you some principles around movement that I want you to note. The number one reason you move in any situation around a small boardroom table, you're up on a stage in front of 50 people, 500 or 45,000 people.
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00:22:40] I want you to get this. I don't want you to miss this. The number one reason you move is to raise the level of engagement, to raise the level of engagement your high school teachers if they were effective. Teachers did this a lot. Remember being seated in the back row of the class. Say it was Western save and you're bored stiff, and you're reading the latest sports illustrated.
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00:23:06] You're reading Cosmopolitan magazine, you're writing a love note. Whatever may happen to be, you're not paying any attention, and that teacher decided to go up the side aisle as he or she was speaking. If you remember this, I bet you tucked that love note into your folder or you hit the magazine. The number one reason you move in any situation is to raise that level of engagement.
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00:23:33] Now, most people don't move properly. If you're anything like me, you paced. You went back and forth and back and forth. I remember someone saying, Bart, you look like a caged lion. You see a lion in a zoo paced back and forth on one side of their cage. That's not movement. That's pacing. And I was the King of that for a long, long time.
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00:23:59] Now the idea of movement, there's a couple of principles you have to embrace. Number one, movement is driven by eye contact. Movement is driven by eye contact. Movement is driven by eye contact. Now the second piece that makes that come to life is this idea that eyes pull you forward. Eyes pull you forward.
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00:24:25] That happens because the premise is this, you always speak when you're looking at a set of eyes. When I dive into eye contact after movement, whether it's in this episode or the following episode, I'll talk about the power of that, but right now, I want you to realize that eyes drive you forward.
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00:24:44] So if I'm up on a stage and I want to move one side to the other, I need to be looking at a side of a set of eyes, and I just walk across the stage. I'm as if I'm having a conversation with that image individual. If I'm around a boardroom table and I'm on one side, and I want to move to the other, I might look at the person on the far side of the room, have eye contact, eye contact with them, share my thought and walk to the other side.
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00:25:11] Eyes always pull you forward. Now when you do that, that leads us to the third principle. That is, you're looking for an anchor. That anchor is what pulls you forward. It also dictates the distance that you want to go to. So if I'm in a round, a boardroom table and I'm at a corner, and I want to go to the far corner on the other side, I could look at that set of eyes, begin to speak, and I can pull myself around to that individual.
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00:25:44] I can stop halfway. I could stop a quarter of the way. There are no right or wrong eyes pull you forward. You're looking for an anchor. The number one purpose of the movement is to raise that level of engagement—those very simple concepts. Now give you command presence anywhere in the room. I want you to own the space that you're in.
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00:26:14] If you feel like you're losing someone at the far end of the room, go in that direction. If you feel like you've lost someone at a boardroom table, go in that direction. If you want to reengage an audience and use PowerPoint on a screen, get up, walk to the screen purely the combination of your posture, and your movement will drive things forward.
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00:26:39] You'll also be able to keep that engagement higher. Now, let me remind you at a one POS podcast I shared with you, you have three major goals. Build trust, build a relationship, and build engagement. This is just one way through movement to keep your engagement higher, critical to your success. Now, most people will say, well, Bart, that's kind of uncomfortable.
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00:27:06] I'm around a boardroom table, and I just get up uncomfortable for you, engaging for your listener. I know typically, if I'm dealing with an executive-level audience and I'm not using PowerPoint, I always pick a couple of places that I get up. I go to a whiteboard, I go to a chalkboard, and I write something down.
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00:27:27] Now, here's what's kind of interesting. When I get up, and everybody goes with me to the whiteboard or the chalkboard, I've draw, I've driven there, their eye contact in a different direction. I've made them shift in their seat. They have to turn their head. That just skyrockets engagement, and then as soon as I come back to my desk, I come back to the boardroom table.
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00:27:49] I'm having a discussion. Again, it's a conversation, guys. This is one of the most. Powerful tools you can put in your toolbox. Number one skill that that develops. Command presence before you open your mouth, your posture. One of the key skills in driving engagement is this idea of movement. Integrate those two skills into anything that you do.
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00:28:17] Whether it's a one on one, it's five people, or it's 5,000. Now, Tim, when I started this podcast, I opened up with this idea, this very simple idea that you're trying to drive engagement and that people buy what they see before they buy what they hear. These are just two elements, two elements that will help you command the room that will keep engagement higher, and they will make you be perceived.
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00:28:49] As a subject matter expert. So I leave you with one thought on this podcast. John Maxwell said that leadership is nothing more, nothing less than pure influence. Your ability to influence people, your ability to drive them forward, to get them to take action, to influence them from point a to point B is your ability to communicate.
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00:29:16] So as we wrap this podcast, as you're going into your week, you go into your day, you go into tomorrow, I want you to begin to think about what one place could I integrate my posture and this idea of movement to my next talk, my next presentation or my next meeting that I handle onsite? Guys, I want you to be confident.
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00:29:39] I want you to be strong, and I want you to increase your ability to influence folks. Guys. It's been a pleasure being with you a short amount of time today. It's always great to see you. This is Bart queen at the remarkability expert act Institute, and I'll see you next time.