Hello everyone, this is Dr. Karen Hardy and welcome to Flip This Risk Podcast where we interview high achievers and this share the stories about their relationship with risk-taking. You can check out our courses related to our podcast topics at flipthisriskacademy.com and make sure that you sign up for our email list. So today I'm happy to have with us Mr.
Michael J. Gel. Michael is a professional public speaker renowned for his life-changing presentations on creative leadership, genius thinking, and conscious business. He has served as an executive leadership and presentation coach to companies such as AT&T, KPMG, MIRK, Microsoft, Nike, and many others.
So welcome Michael to the show. Great to be with you, thanks. Thank you. So the first, listen, you have this great book out, let's just start with that, called Mastering the Art of Public Speaking and we'll get a little bit, dive into that a little bit more.
But one of the things I did know is when I was reading the book was this big statistic and I couldn't believe it, where you actually state that 74% of Americans suffer from glossophobia, which is the fear of public speaking. First of all, that's a huge number and it makes me think that if you're thinking about six degrees of separation, more than likely more than a handful of people, I know all have the fear of public speaking. So what exactly is public speaking and then why are people so afraid of it? Well, you know, you remember your kid in school and standing up and start giving your book report, stumble, get lost, everybody asks at you, no, no, no, no, no.
Oh yeah, oozy. Somebody be humiliated publicly and what happens is we become adults. We are more and more uncomfortable with that sort of possibility. So a lot of folks don't even want to take the risk of getting up in front of a group.
They try to minimize that risk or avoid those opportunities. And obviously public speaking is essential for advocacy of any kind of idea, business, product, anything you want to get more than one other person to do, you're basically going to have to speak the two or three or four. So it's an essential element in being successful in business. It's also something that that really does convey presence and authority and power on individuals.
So the person who can get up and save the right thing at the right time, that helps to calm people when they're fearful or fire them when they're losing hope. This is such an important ability. And it's just if you ever want to be invited by your friends to speak at a wedding or you might be invited to speak at a eulogy. So there's all different kinds of public speaking.
I'm a professional. That means I get paid. But what I love to do is help people who aren't necessarily going to do this for money to do it as though they were doing it for money. I love that, Michael.
I love that that that that I gave to share there because I was just thinking about people I know who have really tuned out because they got flustered because they had to speak in front of people. I used to have a coworker who used to hold this paperclip in his hand and rub it while he was actually speaking. I guess that was a common factor. But when we talk about public speaking, a lot of people immediately think about people like you who do this big stage speaking in front of large groups of people.
What you're saying is that there are scales of public speaking even when it comes to saying good morning to a stranger. Are we doing public speaking? We are. And what's curious is if you let's say you meet people a stranger, somebody casually, how do you connect with them?
How good a listener are you? Do you ask them good questions to get them engaged? Would other people say that you're a good listener? And then when it's time for you to make your point, are you good at telling stories, keep them engaged, you give relevant examples so the people feel that you're really a good communicator.
So I wrote a previous book called The Art of Connection, a heaven relationship building skills every leader needs now. And what that book does is to go into, I have right here, so this book, the art of connection goes into the real skills we need to connect with people one on one. Mastering in Art of Public speaking is the skills we need to connect with people one on anywhere from two to 200,000. So this is really two volumes of the same book.
Part one is Master of the Skills one on one. Part two is expand those so that you can apply the same principles to have more influence and persuasiveness with larger and larger groups of people. That's fantastic. So when you mentioned, I'm going to step back a second, you mentioned when I said that, you know, 74% of people fear claustrophobia and you went back to recall that we've all been in front of the classroom and got, you know, ridiculed in some form of a matter.
Did that happen to you, Michael? I mean, how did you become this professional speaker? Is it because you have one of those experiences? I have plenty of those experiences.
What's funny though is my family is Jewish and Italian. So we got two very highly verbal and I have two younger brothers and every night at our dinner table was an all-out debate. And just to get anybody to listen to you, you have to be very forceful. So all I can tell you is I went to Pasek senior high school in New Jersey.
You know how in high school they give out these awards, like how did it succeed? Most creative, all this stuff. Most artistic or best looking. Well, I won class argument.
That was actually a category. Two years later, my younger brother won it at the same high school. So that gives you an idea of our background. Now I was really blessed.
I met one of the great, famous, high-paid public speakers in the world way back in 1975. And he had just written a book and he's done this very successful television program. This was in England, sort of BBC. And we made a great connection and he was doing a five-day senior management leadership retreat in Switzerland.
And he liked the research and work that I was doing. So he invited me to come and be a special guest on this and to share some of my work. And so I got up in front of the group and I just told stories about what I was learning and how it might be helpful for them. And they seemed to really like it.
So the HR director of this global company said to this fellow who was the star of this course, he said, we want this American guy on all our courses around the world. So all of a sudden, I'm traveling around the world. And I'm not making this up. They would fly me first class all over the world.
They would send a car for me. Wow. Put me up in a five-star hotel. I walk into this room, I get introduced.
People listen to everything I say. They ask me really thoughtful questions. They give me huge applause, sometimes a standing ovation. And then they started giving me money.
Yeah, that's how I became a public speaker. Wow, that's like an easy decision. By far. But for those of us who are indeed terrified because I know folks who've been in the C-suite, who are not good public speakers, they're great with, you know, and technical skills.
And I think today we have a lot of people with a lot of great skillset technically. But with the way we go in in terms of this new normal and the way the world is going to be, how much of a role is public, the importance of public speaking on a public way? It's a great question. I'm so glad you mentioned that about the audience because I have to say for most of my career, part of my work that focuses on helping people develop their public speaking skills and say that the vast majority of people who have engaged me or been sent to me by their senior leadership are people who fit exactly the criteria that you just suggested.
In other words, they're technically excellent, but they often are introverted and are among that 74% with severe loss of phobia. Not only that, they think not only did they not want to learn it, they think they can't learn. So I'll tell you a story. I had it in the book, but I had a client in the financial services business.
They were in-house pensions fund running billions and billions of dollars for, well, I can say it was DuPont. And they wanted this group, wanted to become an independent business unit. They wanted to become their own separate business with DuPont as their main client and then they could serve as other clients. And obviously this would be much more lucrative for them, but they also believed it would be cheaper or DuPont to not have to pay all their benefits and just use them as a service provider.
You know, win, win, they make more money, maybe be able to take on other clients, maybe better able to service DuPont as an independent business. So in order to get that in order to make that happen, I was strategizing with them because I was the executive coach at the head of this group and I've been doing, he engaged me to do all kinds of training. He was a very visionary guy. So the key point over, we had to get his team to get up in front of the pension and benefits committee of DuPont and explain how they were going to do this and how they were going to meet the needs that the pension and benefits committee had.
And that focused on one really fundamental issue, which was value. We had two meanings. One, their strategy of investment was value investing, rather than growth investing. Two, we knew that if we could demonstrate that we really could be a better value than the various firms who are investing the money.
This was for the for the savings plan, voluntary savings plan. It was mostly at that time, I think being run by Merrill Lynch and other outside growers. So our group wanted to get control of it and we had to make they said, okay, they love the top guy, but they said, we need to meet the people who will be running this money. Well, these were classic introverts, glossophobics from central casting.
And literally, they would never have come to me if their boss didn't order that to me, which he did. And they didn't want to work with me. So this is why I'm a professional, because bring them on. So it was helpful to me that they had no choice.
Right, it is. But I'm sure they were terrified. And a lot of people, I've seen this where they just can't function knowing that they have to speak in front of people. But I think what people need to do and what you're saying is that they need to practice this skill, you don't have to just go for the full crowd, the one to many, but you could do just in presentations on your job or trying to share information to your leadership within an organization if you just pin down some of the key things that you talk about.
Because what I'm noticing is that as we get more to the age of data and data analytics, people just rely on pictures to tell the story when in actuality, part of public speaking is having the ability to tell the story and isn't that part of the skill set very much so so strategy with this team was to help them discover a story they could tell naturally. And this fight makes to the chairman of DuPont, the CFO, the head of attention and benefits committee in the boardroom. So you know what these work tables are like in these big companies? Absolutely.
Absolutely. People, Dr. Evil's table in the Austin Powers. Yeah, the long table.
They press the button and you're out. But we had them telling the story and getting used to telling it and they practice telling it to each other. They critiqued it. They helped them work on their body language, their voice tonality, making contact with the audience, eliminating any unnecessary sounds, deleting any cliches.
And what happened is you watch these people transform from terrified to enthusiastic data. By the time we got to doing this, it was so natural to them. Each person went up told the story. Some of the stories are actually in the book.
And it was it seemed like a magical transformation, except it's not magical. It's a skill. It's not your coach. I will train you.
Maybe you're not good at tennis. Maybe you think you have bad hand eye coordination. I use it's coach tennis. We work with you.
We teach you how to do it. In a few months, you're you're hitting four hands in back hands. You're improving your serve. You have a pretty good game.
We can coach you in piano. You start out. You have no musical sense. There's ways of practicing all the sudden.
You're playing your little sonatas. Oh my god. This is this is the delight and that you know, having a hundred billion brain cells. It just didn't come with a manual.
So that's why I write all these books. Absolutely. But let me ask you this question. In terms of people understanding the skill set of public speaking and getting getting them to that place.
You talked about the risk of not public speaking. What are some of the things that people miss out of because they avoid the what they think is a risk in terms of doing that. The biggest thing they miss out on is getting promoted if they're in an organization. Because if you take two people with the same degree of technical expertise and we need one of them to become the executive vice president of the whole group, the factor that may indeed make the difference is that one of them is better at standing up speaking to the whole group than the other one can't because look, here's the thing.
If you move up and up in an organization, you can delegate what is written in your name. I do I coach on the other side. I help them write their messages. They send stuff to me.
I turn it around very quickly and they say, oh my god, that sounds so much better. Thank you so much. So that's great. And then they can put it on their website or send out a bulletin to the whole company.
When they have to stand up in front of the company, whether it's in person or on Zoom or any other modality, they have to stand there. Look at the people, look at the camera and give the presentation. You can't delegate that to your speech. Your speech writer can't be your speech giver.
Oh, absolutely. Do it. So the more important you become, the more important public speaking is. And if you want to become more important, you need to master the art of public speaking.
You know, it's funny because a lot of people think that they don't need more of that. They need more technical skills. And actually you top out of the technical skills and then you come into this new area where it's not about the technical skills at all. You can't make a better graphic.
You can't make a better presentation. The next thing is that you have to engage and connect in terms of communicating, which is a power to a power skill, I think, especially now. It's a huge and we want it to be a positive power skill. Yes, you do.
We do want to be a positive. Everything here is positive. Absolutely. So listen, what about in terms of some tips that you can give people in terms of improving their public speaking skills?
Now that we know that it's a risk if you don't do this, given a new normal and a new business environment that we're about to enter, it's not enough to have the technical expertise. Because you can be the CEO, but when you're doing those broad presentations to your investors, you have to speak to the people. You can't have someone write the messages for you. So where can someone start and what are some tips that you can give people?
Sure. Well, the first thing to say is that everything I will share is even more important in a virtual modality. The only difference is the virtual modality is it makes everything that I put in here even more important. The good news is I had a chance to make final edits while we were aware of the pandemic and so on.
And I didn't have to change much. I basically just said everything we're talking about here is even more important. I'll tell you the first thing. And what's wonderful, I love working with people on their body language, on their facial expressions, on their eye contact.
I love working with people on how do you send to yourself and deal with the stress and transforming. And I teach all sorts of methodologies drawn from the professional theater and also from martial arts, which I've studied and taught for many, many years. But forget all that for a minute. Let's make it really, really simple.
The first thing that starts to transform your fear and help you get on the journey towards mastering the art is to realize this simple truth. The public speech or presentation is not about you. It's about the audience. Excellent.
Excellent point. Yeah. So what happens to people are frightened and we know 74% of people have a lot of focus. They formulate their objectives for every presentation they give unconsciously and it goes something like this.
My objective is to get through this without embarrassment. Yeah. So now we know that that doesn't bring out the best. It's being too risk averse and locking down your creativity, your expressiveness, your commitment.
It's funny. So you mentioned that you're based in DC and I moved there in 1982 and the Red's won the Super Bowl. Now they're going to watch an in football team. But then the next year they were in in the Super Bowl again and even though they lost, it was great.
They were under Joe Gibbs. They were a phenomenal team and they'd be down in the fourth quarter and they would march down the field and they'd always come back to win. But then after Joe Gibbs left, something changed in the culture of the team and they get a fourth quarter lead and they'd start playing not to lose. Yeah.
Quarterback picked them apart and they kept losing losing losing. I know that then a few glory years when Doug Williams came back and led them all the way. Amazing. Hey Mark Riven.
That's not a game Mark Riven. Hey, they and there's just one story that just remember to talk to me what changed on the culture of the team to play on the team. If you play your presentation not to lose, you're going to get picked apart by the audience. So how do you play to win?
You focus on helping the audience instead of worrying about yourself. That moves your energy outward instead of inward the butterflies are all turning around your stomach and it gets the butterflies to fly in formation. So what do you do then? What do you do?
And I have all my clients do this. You write down what specifically do I want my audience to know as a result of my presentation. How do I want them to feel and what do I want them to do? For what you want them to know, keep it simple speaker.
So don't try to cover 57 abstruse points. That's not the purpose of public speaking. Public speaking is to get across one. If you get across one idea that people remember, that's it.
If you can get across three, how will you? How do you want it to feel? It's hugely important because a lot of these technical people you're talking about think that emotion is a part of business and they try to be just all analytical and technical. But human beings always buy on emotion and they justify with that.
So if you want them to be really open to all the really in fact you're going to present them, you've got to connect with them. So you want them to feel comfortable, enthusiastic, engaged, excited about the prospect of what it is you're going to share with them. And then think through what do you want to do as a result of this presentation? Do you want to stop doing something?
Do you want to buy something? Do you want them to spend money to get you something? Understand. And if you don't know why you're doing a presentation, don't do it.
Excellent. People really need to think through and think about the why. Why are you doing this? How are you going to connect with them?
What do they need to know? How do you connect with them? How do you make them feel? And what do you want them to do afterwards?
I think there's like three great tips that anyone can remember, easy to remember, and something they really need to look at and think about pride to actually, you know, community to speaking someone. So before we wrap up, when I went through your book, there's a section that talks about the 10 most annoying expressions. You should stay away from if you want to be an impact speaker. So I selected three of them.
I want you to expand them a little bit more. Okay, but I think this is so great. First of all, one of the annoying expressions you identify is at the end of the day. Why did you include that one in theirs?
An annoying expression you definitely want to stay away from when you're speaking. So mindless gibberish should always be deleted from our speech if we want to have genuine authority. So the phrase at the end of the day should only be used to refer to the period just before sunset. Makes sense to me.
People are really trying to say, if you must say we're say ultimately. That's a good transition word. Yeah. If you need a transition word.
But if you listen to, I listen to a lot of points. And at the end of the day, all things being equal, everybody's got to give 100% because you know, you've got to do what you've got to do. You know what I'm saying? You didn't say anything.
Where's your authority? The other about this, by the way, is it's not some, it's not a sin to say a cliche. We all do it. I myself they slip out, but you want to be aware of what you're saying.
And if you can think and say something fresh, you then have an advantage. You then are growing as an intelligence. So do you want to we want to get smarter and sharper as we get older? Or do we just want to hypnotize ourselves into this mind numbing blah, blah, blah that goes on much of the time and passes for communication and it's just not communication.
You know, it's great. That's really great because in high school, I didn't take 12th grade English. I actually was accepted in this creative school for one year where we wrote poetry. We would talk how to write poetry in the rhythm of words.
And one of the requirements was that whenever we did our recitals, we had to remember everything. We had to memorize everything. You couldn't carry paper. And that really helped me throughout my life in terms of being able to know what you want to say.
You don't know what you want to say. Right? And if you don't pause, take a breath. Think about it.
Think about it. Think about what you're going to say. And don't say anything that doesn't improve on the silence. Yeah, but the silence is very uncomfortable for people.
Right? Okay. So the second one is one of the most annoying expressions you should avoid is the word hack. Hack.
I hate that a lot. Everything's a hackathon. Why do you want to eliminate that word, Michael? It's very popular.
Not necessarily eliminate, but use judiciously. And if possible, find a better word choice because personal hacking refers to illegally breaking into someone else's computer to steal their information. So is that the word ambiance you would like to create and the association that you would like to create with your character and how you are? It's also hack need.
In other words, it's overused. So what these phrases, they started out, they were quite clever. One of the first persons to say, let's bio hack. That was clever as a way to be helped.
After, there's a quote in the book, actually this French poet said, the first man to compare a woman to a rose was a poet. Those afterwards were embeciles. Well, if you're number two, it doesn't matter then, right? You need to come up with it.
Come up with your own word, Joyce, where? Okay. And the final one is very popular, but maybe overused as well. Super power.
Oh, please. People first started using this. Okay, cute. But now every normal human ability is being referred to as a superpower.
Well, it isn't. And guess what? There are no superheroes. Comic books are fantasies.
And so is your life. If you think you're going to develop superpowers, why not just develop real powers like public speaking? And the way to do that is to stop using these phrases that other people will gather out and then others just adopt without reflecting. This is awesome because what you're referring to is to idea of being original.
It's okay to be authentic and original. You don't have to borrow other terms or do other people are doing this. Speak from your center for the most part. Speak from your center and connect with people.
Stopping about you is about them. What do you want them to take away, right? From the experience of being in your presence. I mean, it's really a gift to be able to speak if they stand in front of people.
Either you're doing a presentation or trying to sell another idea. I think people are appreciating brevity, getting to the point, and then coming up with some new ideas and new way of thinking. I mean, it's everybody's time. Time is valuable.
So we want to spend everyone's time wisely. So Michael, just to close out, did you have any final thoughts that you want to leave with the audience? Yes. The other one I'd like people to leave out and delete is please stop saying thank you for your time.
Because the time would have passed whether we were together or not. What does it suggest we put on the end of that? What do we replace it with? For example, if I instead of saying to you at the end of this, well thank you for your time.
You know, just notice how it makes it reach a little flat. I didn't really say anything. It's a cleat. Again, it's mindless.
But if I say, Karen, thank you for so thoughtfully reflecting back what I said when you asked me those beautiful questions. Would you thank your time or would I just say? You know, it doesn't add anything. We need to think in terms of does this add anything at all?
Well, that is awesome. Michael, thank you for your time. I'm going to resist. But no, this is great.
It's very helpful, especially for my audience who are risk professionals and deal with a lot of technical information. But also those who are not in that field, I think it's something everyone can find value in and in this plenty of room to grow. And we should definitely shouldn't be afraid to take the risk and the public speaking. We can only grow and do better from it.
Well, for those risk professionals, make sure to direct them to read the chapter in the book on molecule following. Sure will. And in that note, I want to thank you, Michael again. And thank you, everyone, for tuning in to Flip This Risk.
I'm Dr. Karen Hardy, and I'll catch you next time.