Influence in every channel

Increase your influence – become even more curious

Influential people are insatiably curious about others; they make a habit of noticing how they think, feel and decide. Their attention is tuned in to notice, to question and to learn. Curiosity is a bedrock skill of influence and persuasion. When you are deeply curious about how to best approach an opportunity, learn from a setback or face a challenge you will rapidly increase your knowledge, emotional resilience and creative ideas; all ingredients of influence.

We need to influence people through many different channels – on the phone, face to face, in formal presentations or sales pitches – and each channel has its own unique challenges and opportunities. So once we become curious about how we can do things differently in whatever channel we use to communicate with others we can choose the right channel and make sure we use it to our best advantage.

The problem with email and how to fix it

There’s a whole world out there (mostly online) where scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists, technology companies, health professionals and other curious souls are talking about the effects of information overload on our brains, bodies and emotions. Most of us who sit in front of computers all day will understand what the psychiatrist Howard Hallowell means when he talks about ‘attention deficit trait’ – the average worker receives around 100 emails a day and managers up to 300, yet everyone agrees that a third of them are ‘unnecessary’. It’s no wonder knowledge workers find it difficult to stay focused given that they spend around two hours a day dealing with information that is of little or no value to them. But it’s not just the amount of time wasted, it’s also stressful; so stressful in fact that Linda Stone has discovered that many of us suffer from ‘email apnea’ (the unconscious cessation of regular and steady breathing) – a physiological response to dealing with so much information.

The cost of information overload for business is also significant: Intel’s research on its own employees found that the company was wasting $1 billion a year on lost productivity alone; while HP’s research found that the effect on knowledge workers who were constantly interrupted was that their IQ was reduced by up to 10 points (the equivalent to being stoned on marijuana). A study by Microsoft found that when we’re interrupted by an email or phone alert we not only read the message but we take, on average, 24 minutes to return to the task we were doing. So when we add it all up, the cost to both business and us is enormous.

Many of us now use email to sell our services or products, to strengthen important relationships or to build new ones. Most projects at work are delivered by the back and forth seesaw of email traffic and instant messaging, with people who sit opposite one another emailing rather than talking. We’ve become addicted. But email should come with its own special health warning and, if we want to influence somebody, it is better to pick up the phone or arrange a personal meeting. If we use email to sell our ideas and persuade others we need to get to grips with what’s really happening in this slippery medium because one of the most important recent research findings on email is that it’s been proven to have an inbuilt negative bias. If you send an email you think is ‘positive’, the message is received by the other person as ‘neutral’, but when you send an email that is ‘neutral’, it is likely to be read in a more negative light. Given that it’s often used to deliver messages we might find difficult to deliver face-to-face, email can become a heat-seeking missile for misunderstanding and reducing our influence with others.

Turbo-charge your meetings

We often set regular meetings on the same day, with the same people for the same length of time and often with the same agenda so it’s easy to fall into the trap of repeating the same structure and the same behaviours. The problem is we get the same outcomes. Here are some of the typical problems of ineffective meetings:

• Unclear outcomes, purpose or agenda.
• Inviting everyone in the team rather than those who need
  to attend.
• Thinking meetings are a way to build team spirit.
• Starting late, overrunning, allowing people to waffle.
• Holding meetings that are little more than a way to update the team on activities.

The first thing to do is to be clear and distinguish between each meeting you have – agree the purpose and what specifically you want to achieve. First, consider what type of meeting you need to hold. The most common type of business meeting is a ‘telling’ meeting where people present an update on their specific area to the rest of the team; these are the least effective meetings you can hold. Meetings should be focused on getting people to take action, to make decisions or to contribute their ideas about a project, plan or proposal. So the first step is to be clear about the purpose of your meeting. The table below describes four different types of team meeting and their outcomes in terms of behaviour.

The first thing to do is to get your team to agree what’s working well and what needs to change and watch their motivation and commitment increase. Work through these questions with your team:

• Are meetings the best structure to achieve our shared goals?
• What other structures would work better for us?
• What would an ideal meeting be like?
• What should we stop doing at meetings?
• What is not working well in our meetings?
• What’s the most important thing we should be discussing at our meetings?
• What do we want by the end of the meeting that we don’t have now?
• What will we each do before our next meeting to stay on track?
• What has been the most useful thing we have achieved today?

Getting things back on track

If you are meeting with somebody you’ve had conflict with and you want to positively influence the relationship to get back on track, use a simple but powerful neurolinguistic programming tool called metaposition. You can do the following exercise with a trusted colleague or friend or on your own.

Exercise

Go into a quiet place and step through the process below:

See the world from different perspectives.

Go to position one and answer the following questions from your perspective:

1. What do you want to achieve from the meeting?
2. What is most important to you about this issue (what are your values)?
3. What do you most fear?
4. How do you see the other person (judgements, criticisms, views and opinions)?
5. What beliefs do you hold?

Go to position two and imaginatively become the other person – use their gestures, posture and language. Talk from their perspective when answering the questions.

1. What do you want to achieve from the meeting?
2. What is most important to you about this issue (what are your values)?
3. What do you most fear?
4. How do you see the other person (judgements, criticisms, views and opinions)?
5. What beliefs do you hold?

Next move into third position, which is the neutral position, and take a moment to (imaginatively) notice the behaviour, body language, tone of voice, eye contact, energy, emotion and relationship between the two people as if you are watching them from a distance.

Go to position three and answer the following questions:

1. What do you notice about the way these two people interact?
2. What values do they share in common?
3. What stops them from connecting more deeply?
4. What advice would you give them to achieve their common goals?
5. What needs to change?

If you do this exercise with emotional honesty you may be surprised at what you discover. Give yourself time and space to do the exercise and reap the rewards. It can help to do it with a coach but, as long as you commit to doing the exercise ‘as if’ you were with a coach (avoid rushing, or assuming you already know the answer before you get there), it can uncover invaluable information that you might have missed.

The biggest challenge is to have a truly open mind about what might be going on for the other person and to be honest about your own feelings. Influence is about learning and growing, not about being ‘perfect’ or above the fray. The fray is where we learn and grow. Once you have gained new insights, you can then plan on how to manage the next meeting with increased influence and wisdom.

Presenting with influence

The role of mirror neurons

Have you ever sat through a presentation where the speaker was nervous, looked down, raced through their information and avoided eye contact? Chances are that you ended up feeling uncomfortable because your mirror neuron system picked up their feelings of anxiety and you began to mirror those exact same emotions (see Fig. 6.1). Feelings of fear are transmitted instantaneously from person to person and our automatic response to fear is to flee. So people literally want to get away from presenters who arouse a state of fear in them.

Unless a presenter can manage their own emotional state and get back on track, it’s not long before an audience begins to actively dislike them because they are unconsciously creating unpleasant feelings in the group. And it doesn’t matter how interesting or compelling the information in your presentation is, if your audience feels uncomfortable or anxious they won’t concentrate on your message – they will move into fight–flight mode which will prevent their brain from thinking and motivate them to move away. And the problem with mirror neurons is that they operate on a two-way feedback loop; once the audience becomes anxious, embarrassed or uncomfortable, the presenter will pick up their emotions, which will only increase their own. This can soon turn into a full-blown, emotional downward spiral.

Fear of public speaking is one of the most common fears we all share. It’s not that the best speakers have no anxiety – it’s just that they spend more time preparing their emotional state. Influential speakers are influential not because of the content of their material but because of their ability to spark positive emotions in the audience.

FIGURE 6.1 Our mirror neuron system helps us identify and understand the emotions of others.

5th rule of influence in every channel:

In presentations, your mirror neurons will communicate your emotions to others. Create a positive emotional state.

Delivering the message

So what are some strategies to help you deliver your message with ease and comfort and give yourself the best chance to persuade and influence?

Start with ease

The first few minutes can be the hardest as you warm up and get comfortable. Script your first 60–90 seconds so you know exactly what you want to say. Practise in front of the mirror. Record it on your phone and listen back to yourself. Memory recall research has found that we remember the first and last thing people say and not as much from the middle. So prepare a tightly structured introduction and conclusion where you sum up the main points that you want people to remember.

Be measured with your time

Make sure you have clear pauses between your sentences. When you pause, take a deep breath which will help settle your nerves and create a sense of calm. Getting off to a clear start will help you relax.

Use your audience to help you relax

Presenters who are nervous often avoid looking directly at the audience; instead they look at the back of the room, down at the floor or at the presentation slides. But this can make them appear disconnected and uninterested in their audience. When we make direct eye contact with people, this helps calm our fight–flight response – because rather than looking at a sea of people we start looking at individuals.

Make the right amount of eye contact

We all want to be seen by others and eye contact is the quickest way to acknowledge someone’s presence and thereby establish empathy and rapport.

Hold eye contact for three seconds before moving on to the next person. This is important; less than three seconds and it feels like a cursory glance, more than three seconds and it can start to feel like a stare which triggers our fight–flight response. You can try this out in a neutral situation like at a pub or supermarket or with friends before trying this at a formal presentation to get comfortable and practise. Make it your goal to connect with as many people as you can. We all want to be seen by others and eye contact is the quickest way to acknowledge someone’s presence and thereby establish empathy and rapport.

6th rule of influence in every channel:

In presentations, make eye contact with your audience to help you relax and build rapport.

Use visually beautiful and compelling images

This is so easy to do – images are not just visual cues they’re emotional cues and they can help you create positive emotions in the audience. When you change the slide, give your audience a quiet moment to look at the image, take a moment to pause and look around the room, take a deep breath and prepare your next point.

Pause

Build pauses into your presentation – a moment of silence helps to calm down anxiety, reset your focus and give your audience time to digest the information.

Use video to support your message

There are so many fascinating, educational and inspiring videos on the Internet, particularly on sites such as TED.com. Find a short clip that will help reinforce your message. Our brain loves variety and when we provide information in different ways this helps the audience remember the message, connect emotionally and gives you a chance to breath, relax and prepare.

Create two-way conversations

Create opportunities for the audience to ask questions or spend a few minutes talking to the person next to them. There are many creative ways of breaking up the talk and connecting people. Think creatively about what you want to achieve and give yourself permission to find different ways to achieve it. Stand out from the crowd by making your presentations different.

Ask yourself:

• How can I create a sense of ease in myself and the audience?
• What are some creative ways that I can get my message across?
• What would work best in this context?
• What state is my audience in and how can I move them emotionally to where I want to go?

Use timelines

We each have ‘timelines’ – a cognitive way of sorting time (past from future) and ‘locating’ things such as events, memories of the past and pictures and imaginings of the future. The majority of people locate past events to their left. For example, if you ask somebody to recall an event that happened six months ago, they will instinctively move their eyes (while they are visualising) to their left. And when asked to imagine something that will happen in the future they will move their eyes (while visualising) to the right.

There are other ways people cognitively process time (for example, some people visualise a line that stretches from ‘behind’ them and moves through them in a forward direction), but, if you are presenting to a large group, it’s safe to assume that the majority of your audience will share a timeline that moves from left to right. Once you understand how our brain processes time you can use this as a powerful tool when speaking or presenting in order to influence and reinforce your message. By sorting ‘past’ events on the left and ‘future’ to the right, you will match their unconscious timeline and reinforce your message. But remember that in order for you to ‘match’ the audience’s timeline you will be reversing your own which may well feel unnatural to you.

You can use timelines in your presentations:

• When you want to make clear distinctions between important information.
• To help your audience mentally separate and sort information.
• To create positive emotional ‘anchors’ for the toward emotions – achievement, anticipation, success.
• To separate and ‘contain’ difficult emotions the group may have experienced – loss, anxiety, disappointment, change, etc.
• When communicating change in business.

Left	Right
Past	Future
Bad news	Good news
Poor results	Anticipated results
Problems, difficulties	Plans, actions, solutions
Logic	Storytelling, metaphor
One department, site, business	Another department site, business
Old products, services	New products, services
Intellectual knowledge	Skills, behaviours
	Call to action

Use the stage

Use the stage as a tool in your presentation to help your audience sort information and emotion. Create specific areas on the stage where you talk about challenges, issues or problems and then consciously move to another area when you talk about future, solutions, actions, etc. This will help people cognitively sort your messages and create different emotional anchors where your audience will (unconsciously) feel toward and away from emotions and motivations.

There are a number of different visual aids which you can use to enhance the effect. These could include two different flipcharts in different areas or the stage (see Fig. 6.2), screens with different PowerPoint presentations, exhibits on different wall spaces or just different colour pens.

FIGURE 6.2 Use physical space to reinforce your message.

Here are some Dos and Don’ts for successful presentations.

Ways to lose influence in presentations	Ways to gain influence in presentations
Launch into your presentation without a clear, structured approach.	Prepare your first 60–90 seconds. Script it. Practise it in the mirror. Record it on your phone and play it back to yourself.
Risk: you lose the attention of the audience quickly and you come across as disorganised.	Result: you feel confident and get off to a strong start.
Lack of eye contact with the audience. Looking over people’s heads to the back of the room.	Make eye contact with members of the audience. This will calm your nerves and create connection and empathy. Hold eye contact for three seconds (shorter and you fail to connect, longer and it starts to be uncomfortable).
Risk: you fail to gain emotional connection with your audience.	Result: this will calm your nerves and create empathy and connection.
You move around the stage in an attempt to avoid eye contact and to calm yourself down.	Find a comfortable location on the stage, adopt a strong balanced posture and stand still for much of your presentation.
Risk: you appear nervous and this is distracting to your audience.	Result: you have more gravitas and authority.
You lean more on one leg, put your hands in your pocket, or behind your back, lean on a table or stand behind a podium.	Stand evenly on both legs. Hold something in your hand to give you a focus and prevent you from putting hands in pockets.
Risk: you appear overly casual but nervous.	Result: you feel stronger and more confident.
You read out the words on your slides.	Your slides should have no more than three short bullet points (maximum). Let your audience read your slides at their own pace.
Risk: you lose impact. Reading over the top of your audience is distracting.	Result: your audience is able to concentrate and absorb information.
You look at the PowerPoint slides along with your audience.	Give your audience time to read and digest information. Take short pauses to look at your audience, breathe and connect. Wait until their eyes come back to you.
Risk: you miss the opportunity of connecting with your audience.	Result: you have time to relax, breathe and prepare.
You have lots of dense text on your slides that you expect your audience to read while you talk over the top of them.	People cannot listen and read at the same time. Put complex information in a handout.
Risk: you confuse and bore your audience.	Result: your audience feel relaxed and engaged.
You speak quickly and don’t include enough pauses.	Breathing and pausing gives you and your audience time to think and digest your message.
Risk: your audience feel rushed and anxious and they cannot assimilate your message.	Result: you and your audience feel relaxed and calm and you can connect and influence.

7th rule of influence in every channel:

In presentations, use the stage, room or space to reinforce your message.

Tips for presentations:

1. If you have an important presentation it’s worth investing in a voice and body coach to help you prepare and get professional feedback, advice and support.
2. Practise your speech or presentation in front of your friends or colleagues and ask for honest feedback.
3. Watch great speakers on Ted.com and notice what they do to connect with their audience.
4. For a comprehensive set of affordable download tools on presentation skills go to: The Gravitas Method (http://thegravitasmethod.com/).

Influencing on the phone

The telephone is a great channel for influencing people as it gives you the opportunity to build understanding, rapport and to pick up on vocal and other cues from the other person. It’s also an opportunity to develop your voice as a tool of influence. Many organisations rely on conference calls to connect virtual teams together; a lot of coaching takes place over the phone and we all need to sell, persuade and influence on one-to-one phone calls. Here are some ways to lose and gain influence during conference calls and one-to-one phone calls.