Pitch Perfect

Bill McGowan: Unfortunately it happens a lot more often than we probably would like to admit, because all of us have various communication opportunities in the course of any given day that we might not think are high-stake situations, but they are occurrences where what you say and how you say it matters, and could be the determinant between having a successful outcome and a disappointing one.

So it could be walking into your boss's office to give an update on a project you're working on or giving a presentation to a client who may give you their business, or asking for a raise or promotion. And then there are all these personal situations away from the office. You may be asked to give a toast at a family gathering, or maybe a friend is mad at you and you have to say sorry because you've been neglecting them. There are so many situations where a little thinking ahead of time and planning could really go a long way towards saying the right thing.

Rachel Salaman: You mentioned a lack of planning there. What else gets in the way of people communicating effectively?

Bill McGowan: There is a really difficult situation most people have in which they say the first thing that pops into their head. We hear people say that all the time when somebody says, "Why did you say that" – "I don't know, it was the first thing that came to mind."

And that's really not a good strategy, and I find that people don't curate their thoughts as carefully as they should, and sometimes that's just a product of speaking too fast, and if you allow your vocal pace to accelerate and speed up, what you're really doing is you're putting a lot of pressure on your brain to feed back to your mouth information that you need to use to articulate your thoughts. When you're speaking really fast, you're essentially not giving your mind the opportunity to pick the best thing that you want to say – it's forcing your mind to just pick the first thing. So vocal pace has a big role in this.

Rachel Salaman: And in your experience, can anyone learn to be more eloquent or are some people better at this than others?

Bill McGowan: I think if you've grown up around a parent or an uncle or an aunt who has been incredibly eloquent and always seems to say the right thing, you've probably learned a lot of this through osmosis, but I do believe that people can learn it the way you learn how to play a sport like golf or tennis.

Basically, the approach is get yourself one or one or in a small group with somebody who can teach you the basics – how to be concise, how to be a good storyteller – and then once you're armed with those basics and those best practices, grab every opportunity you can to get up and speak.

That would be the equivalent of after a tennis lesson trying to play as many matches as you can to ingrain those good habits, and that's a big reason why I wanted to write the book, because I find that we're able to make this transformation in people who come to our offices for one-on-one sessions, and instead of now shying away from accepting an opportunity to speak publicly, they're the first ones raising their hands, and it's one of these situations that feeds on itself: the more you do it, the better you get at it, the better you get at it, the more you enjoy it, the more you enjoy it, the more you want to do it more. So the book really was designed to give the reader as close an experience to a one on one coaching session as possible.

Rachel Salaman: In the book you outline seven principles of persuasion, you call them, which are linked to what you've just been telling us about, and the first one is the headline principle, which focuses on the first 30 seconds of a conversation or a presentation.

I thought it was great that you list some of the things that people get wrong at the start of their talks, which is almost as helpful as being told how to do it properly. Can you share some of those now?

Bill McGowan: I'd be happy to. What I see over and over again when I coach people to give a presentation or a keynote speech is there's a lot of signposting about what you're about to do. And what I hear all the time is someone get up and say, "So what I'd like to talk about today is topic X, Y and Z, and then I'm going to cover topics A, B and C, but before I do that I'd like to walk you through and take a look at…."

There's all this announcing of what people are going to do, and it adds a tremendous amount of length to a presentation, when the more effective tactic would be to not announce you're going to do it, but just to do it, and figure out some kind of dynamic declarative way to start a presentation that is central to the overall theme of what you're trying to accomplish in the talk.

And I don't think a lot of people actually take a step back and think super-big picture. It's really a helpful exercise to ask yourself: "OK, what am I trying to accomplish in this talk, in this presentation, in this conversation, leading this meeting? What do I want the outcome to be, and how can I go about crystallizing my thoughts to be as persuasive as possible to make that outcome happen?"

Rachel Salaman: How do you help people find their headline if it's not obvious to them?

Bill McGowan: Typically what I hear is that the point they're building towards that may wind up being revealed 40 or 45 seconds into the conversation winds up being the most important and dynamic thought they have, and in a one-on-one coaching session what I'm able to do is stop them and say, "That sentence you just said? That's where you begin: that's your headline thought and what you should do is take all the other material you've used to build up to that point and make it an addendum to that thought, because people's focus and engagement is never going to be higher than in the first five or ten seconds of what you're saying."

If you bury your big idea – your headline statement – about 40 seconds in, you're playing a game of diminishing returns, and the likelihood that people are still going to be attentive and engaged that far into the conversation isn't as likely as if you lead with it.

Rachel Salaman: Moving onto the second principle that you outline in your book, you call it the Scorsese principle, and this is all about engaging people like a film director would. What do you mean by that exactly?

Bill McGowan: We are all very visual creatures, and the fact that we daydream a lot or we like to look at screens all the time really proves that. And one of the biggest drawbacks that people fall victim to in public speaking is speaking in a very pictureless abstract and theoretical way.

What I'm trying to urge in the book is to stimulate the visual side of your audience's brain, and that means speak in visual images: tell stories. They are 22 times more likely to be remembered than just facts and basic information, and in the mind of your listener there's always a movie reel spooling around and feeding images through; and you as the speaker in front of that audience, you need to be dictating what images are spooling through the mind of your listener, and if you don't do that and you stay very theoretical and abstract, what happens is that movie reel in your audience's mind keeps spinning, but now it starts spinning with the images that are manufactured by that audience member. That's what we call daydreaming and distraction, so when you're in front of an audience you need to be absolutely fearless in dictating what imagery your audience is going to be engaged with.

Rachel Salaman: And in the book you offer a really great formula for great stories. Could you just briefly talk us through that now?

Bill McGowan: It's not unlike telling a joke, and sometimes that's discouraging to the people we coach because they say, "Well I'm a terrible joke teller, so I don't know if there's much hope for me to be a good storyteller," and I let them know there are basically three important components to any good story. There's the setup that gives the person ample context to understand all the information that's going to follow, but it's very important in the setup to extract any detailed information that really isn't essential to getting and understanding the crux of the story. And then probably after the setup there's some kind of build of dramatic tension of some kind, where you are now making the listener sit on the edge of their seat waiting for the payoff to this story. And then of course there's the reveal of how this tension gets resolved. So if you think in terms of those three components to a story, you probably are going to wind up telling an efficient story that has some impact.

Rachel Salaman: Well, you've hinted there that some stories are not efficient and can get a bit rambling. What are some of the clues that people should look out for if they think they've lost their listeners maybe, and what can they do about it?

Bill McGowan: When you're standing and talking to somebody at a party, and you get that dreaded peer over your shoulder where your conversation partner is now looking to see who else they can move off to to speak to at the party, that's a dead giveaway. And also just when eye contact starts to break, or your conversation partner starts to get a little fidgety or antsy, that's usually an indication that you're taking too long with the setup to the story, or maybe you're dragging out the buildup.

So what we talk about in the book is how you make a story collapsible, so that you can read your audience in terms of what their threshold for paying attention to it is, and maybe collapse the buildup so that you can get to the punchline of the reveal faster.

But also I find that a lot of people start to tell a story and they'll say, "I was traveling in Italy last week and I was in Naples, actually no, it wasn't Naples it was Capri; well anyway..." and they start editing themselves to be exactly perfect or factually 100% accurate, and when you're telling a story really that's not the most important thing – it's not as though you're under sworn oath in a court of law. You want to keep the story moving forwards, and I find a lot of people edit themselves because they're fearful that they haven't articulated themselves perfectly.

Rachel Salaman: So people should be aware that they're doing that and just stop themselves from doing that?

Bill McGowan: Yes, we call that verbal backspacing, and I find that when I coach writers and journalists who write their stories on a computer, that they tend to talk the way they write – where a journalist will type a word and he or she will think, "That's not maybe the best word," and then they hit the backspace button several times and type a new word, and I find that there is a way of mimicking that in speech as well which creates a very halting delivery, and people actually start to lose patience with that type of delivery.

Rachel Salaman: Well, that leads nicely onto your third principle which is the pasta sauce principle – about boiling down your message so that it's as rich as possible. So how can you determine how long a speech or declaration should be and figure out what you need to keep rather than what you need to cut?

Bill McGowan: There are many studies that have been done that show the length of attention span in an audience that is listening to a speech or a presentation, and they know they're sitting in there in order to be an audience. Studies have shown after 18 minutes people's attention starts to really fall off a cliff: that seems to be the threshold past which it's very hard to engage an audience, and I found it was not a coincidence when President Obama had his second inaugural speech in the United States, that his speech was exactly 18 minutes long.

I find even on an email that I write, that maybe just an average everyday email, I can usually go back through when I'm reading it, just to make sure there are no typos or mistakes, and I often just take out 10 words on average because they're extraneous – they're redundant: I really don't need them – and it becomes a matter of being your own brutal editor.

The fact is, if you took out 25 percent of your presentation or your speech, you may feel as though there's a gaping hole there but you're the only one who does. The audience has absolutely no idea that that original version was 25 percent greater, and it's probably one of the most difficult things to edit yourself down, but it's such a worthwhile examination and exercise to start shaving wherever you can.

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Rachel Salaman: The fourth principle in your book is the no tailgating principle. So tell us about that.

Bill McGowan: We alluded to that a little bit earlier in regards to the relationship between your brain and your mouth. And in the book I ask the reader to imagine that those two things are like cars on a road. Think of your brain as the lead car and your mouth as the trail car, and your brain is about a millisecond ahead of your mouth, and what it's doing is it's coming up to these intersections where you're deciding what conversational road you're going to go down and actually the words you're going to use to articulate that thought, and then your mouth follows along once your brain has made that decision. And we'd like to think that our brains make those decisions very efficiently, but sometimes you come up to that intersection or roundabout and you ponder, you stop and you debate what it is you're going to say.

And in those situations if you're speaking fast, your mouth needs to do something while it's waiting for your brain to make that decision, and typically that's when people use filler language: the ums, you knows, the likes, the kind-ofs, the sort-ofs – it's basically your mouth running in place until you have the next coherent thought that you can articulate.

So the idea is don't tailgate your brain: don't speak fast and have your brain right on the back bumper of your brain. What you want to do is you want to build a safe speaking length distance and embrace this principle that the less certain you are about the next thought and sentence coming out of your mouth, the slower you should be talking; the more you should be building in pauses. And then when you hit a stretch where you're absolutely certain how you're going to articulate the next thought, then you can step on the gas, and be nice and brisk and conversational the way you normally are, but it really helps to slow down when you're less certain.

Rachel Salaman: But what happens if your pauses are too long? What's better – a really long pause or just a medium length pause with an um in the middle of it?

Bill McGowan: I think the other thing that people are a little surprised by is how the length of the pause inside their own head differs in perception from how the audience is receiving it. It feels to us if we have two beats of silence that there is just this extensive dead air, and it doesn't look that way to an audience: in fact it looks like a thoughtful pause, so I would say that a two or three beat pause, when you actually allow the audience to almost see you thinking about how you want to articulate it, is a better way to go.

Rachel Salaman: Let's move onto the conviction principle, which is about conveying relentless conviction even if you don't feel it, which most of us don't most of the time. What are some of the specific phrases that people say that undermine that impression of conviction that we should all be aiming for?

Bill McGowan: I hear them in meetings all the time where someone gets up and they start uttering these inherently apologetic phrases where maybe they start with, "So I know you've probably heard this before, or for some of you I'm probably covering territory you already know, or this might not be the best idea you've heard but...."

It's all this qualifying and apologizing: even the term "Let me quickly walk you through this presentation" has inherent apology to it – it means that I know you're going to be bored so if they do this fast you'll be bored for less time.

And I find that these really undermine presentations. You never want to say anything that implants the idea in your audience that they're not going to be riveted and interested in what you're saying. In fact, I'm sure we've all heard people get up at conventions or meetings and they're in that 11:30 timeslot and they get up and say, "So listen, I know everybody is starting to think about lunch and everybody is starting to feel a little bit hungry, but I'm just really going to quickly take you through." That means I know you'd rather have lunch than listen to me.

So I get people to extract all of those apologies from their text.

Rachel Salaman: And they instantly feel more conviction, I'm sure.

Bill McGowan: They do, and also that filler of sort-of and kind-of is a big conviction sapper. If you were to say I think this idea is sort-of what we need, that really waters down your thought rather than to say this idea is absolutely what we need. The two things have a very different sound to them.

Rachel Salaman: Your sixth principle is the curiosity principle – about displaying genuine interest in other people. So what does listening have to do with expressing yourself?

Bill McGowan: If people want to be accomplished conversationalists, it is not about just waiting your turn to talk about yourself again. And one of the terms that we coin in the book is the people we call "egg timer narcissists," and I know we've all come across them at a party, where literally within two or three minutes of you sharing a story, you can see the other person is starting to get antsy because the conversation has veered away from their favorite topic which is them, and they're really not listening, they are merely just waiting their turn so they can talk about themselves again, and that is not conversation.

That is a little bit closer to what we do in digital and social communication where we sort-of blast out what we're thinking and what we want to say, so in some respects the way we communicate through social media is starting to have an effect on how we communicate verbally and face to face, and the greatest gift you can give somebody, either in business or socially, is to give them your undivided attention: listen to them, because there's a very good chance that you may learn something.

There was a great quote the other day I saw in which they said listening is not a matter of planning your next response, it's really a matter of coming away learning something, and I feel like we shortchange ourselves of that incredible gift that's possible in conversation if we're genuinely curious about the other person. And that translates into what's my facial expression? What vibe am I giving off to this other person? Am I making good eye contact? And showing that I'm genuinely interested in what they're saying – or am I even checking my phone or looking past their shoulder or starting to fidget in place? I think we've come across both types in social situations.

Rachel Salaman: And talking about the right expression to have on your face, you include in the book a discussion of what you call the "best friend face." Could you tell us about that?

Bill McGowan: We've seen them in audiences. If we have to get up and present, they're the people out there who are smiling, they're nodding, they're giving us that positive reinforcement that what we're saying is interesting and it's resonating. And one of the tricks to being a more confident presenter is to zero in on those people in your audience, and I advise clients to try to find somebody flashing you that best friend face in each quadrant of the room – somebody in the near right section, the far right section, the far left, and the near left. If you are intimidated speaking to a very big audience – 200 or more – it's a great strategy to now imagine you're having a conversation with just those four people; no one in the audience is going to know that you're merely playing to them.

What you want to do is avoid the person who is looking sour, disagreeable, tuned out, bored – and that doesn't mean they actually are bored, it means that they really don't appreciate how telling the vibe they give off is by their facial expression.

Rachel Salaman: Your last principle is the Draper principle, which refers to Don Draper from the TV show "Mad Men," who famously declared, "If you don't like what's being said, change the conversation." So how does this relate to the discussion?

Bill McGowan: I find that in both work and social situations, or it could be a work party, you find yourself in a little conversation cluster and suddenly people are talking about a subject that is not your strength – it's a sport that you don't play, it's a TV show you don't watch, it's a vacation destination you've never been to – and it can result in you being wallpaper and just staring down at your drink. It means that you have the ability to steer the conversation very subtly towards something that you do know about, that you can enter into the conversation.

So, for instance my wife is a fairly decent American baseball fan, but she doesn't know that much about it to really engage in a conversation, so at a dinner party the men around the table are comparing statistics of American baseball and she can't enter into that conversation – but yet she heard a profile done of a notable player on a radio show she listens to and because he wrote a book, and so she enters into the conversation by talking about this profile of this one player and talking about what she found interesting about it, and it's a player that's known to all the other people around the table who are comparing statistics, and in that way she has steered the conversation to something that she can add and not just be left on the sidelines.

Rachel Salaman: Now, you include a chapter about thinking on your feet, which of course is something that people often have to do. Could you explain what you mean by spontaneity is another word for regret?

Bill McGowan: There are several things in real life in low-risk communication situations that are absolutely fun to do. One of them is to just be completely spontaneous, and I'm not ever suggesting that we should remove that from the equation altogether. We're out for coffee or tea with a friend, we're playing a sport with somebody, our regular partner, those are not what I call high-stakes communication situations. And in those situations it is great to be spontaneous and say the first thing that pops into your head.

What I'm suggesting is there are communication opportunities during the day that do matter where you don't necessarily want to leave everything to winging it and making it up on the fly, and in those situations I think it's really important to have a game plan. You're heading into a meeting at work; maybe on the surface of it you don't think that you're going to have a speaking part, that you're just there to attend, but you really can't bet on that. You should go into every situation asking yourself, "If I got called on here for my opinion, what would I say?"

You don't want to go it completely unprepared to any situation where you're going to be evaluated. This may sound a little crazy, but even when I get on the phone to a customer service representative, if I have a problem with something I've bought or a reservation I've made, I develop a quick little game plan. It takes me five minutes: I figure out what my two or three major points that I'm going to make are, I try to anticipate what their pushback may be to me, and what my response to the pushback will be, to make the most compelling argument to get the outcome that I want from this situation, and I find that it really does work. Also, if I have a game plan mapped out I'm likely to stay more calm, more logical, and not have the thing devolve into something overly emotional.

Rachel Salaman: You finish the book with tips for specific situations and this is a great section. These range from how to nail a job interview to how to apologize for a mistake. What are a couple of these that you've found to be particularly useful for people?

Bill McGowan: I think we see public figures every week these days being forced into a situation where they have to apologize for some gaffe they've made, and what we've been seeing is that especially people who are CEOs or celebrities, many times they don't issue the kind of apology that gets the job done right away: it's either too much about them, it's too narcissistically driven or they try to justify or qualify why they did it.

I find then there's just a sparcity of people saying, "That was not my best moment, I am terribly sorry. There is really no excuse I can give why that happened and it won't happen again."

Short and sweet: you need to fall on your sword quickly and cleanly and not make this a drawn-out kind of excuse-laden, let me see if I can save part of my hide type of strategy.

So that's a big part of apologizing the right way, and we train business people all the time to say, "That was not what we intended to do, it falls far short of the standards we set for ourselves. Here's what we've done to make sure this is not going to happen again," and make it seem as though you've learned something from the mistake.

Rachel Salaman: It's clear from our conversation that a lot of these techniques need practice. Where is a good place for people to start on this journey?

Bill McGowan: I think that people should accept every opportunity to speak publicly. So maybe it's getting up at a meeting at work or your boss has asked you to give a presentation and it's a voluntary thing, so instead of shying away and maybe delegating it to somebody else, grab that opportunity, raise your hand and try to get as many repetitions in as possible. That's the only way you get better at anything, whether it's playing an instrument, playing a sport, speaking a foreign language: you have to not turn aside these opportunities to give a toast, make a presentation, get up at an event to say something nice about someone – that's the only way to get better.

Rachel Salaman: Bill McGowan, thanks very much for joining me today.

Bill McGowan: Rachel, I really enjoyed it. Thank you.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Bill's book again is ‘Pitch Perfect: How to Say it Right the First Time, Every Time'. You can find out more about him and his work at www.claritymediagroup.com.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then goodbye.