Are you trying too hard to be perfect when you need to speak or present?  I have a secret to share with you that may liberate you from this overwhelming desire to be perfect. For years, whenever I had to speak in front of groups, I had a concern at the back of my mind that my accent would be an impediment. I knew that my accent was slight and did not prevent people from understanding me, but somehow it still felt less than perfect.  After all, most of my speaking and training is done in English, which is my second language. Even the fact that  I was a linguist and a certified ESL instructor who used to teach English grammar and writing to international students in the U.S. didn’t help. Only through a lot of practice and feedback from my audiences, I came to the conclusion that it really didn’t matter.  On the contrary, I was often better prepared because I paid more attention to how I phrased things and rehearsed more. People were curious to know where I was from, which made me stand out and led to more interesting conversations. And most importantly, whenever I helped others with their communication challenges, I could honestly say that if I was able to become a speaker, coach and trainer in a second language, they could become more effective communicators too. I could help them because I knew their struggles, self-doubt and fears of public speaking.  Speaking is about connection, not perfection.

Perfect speeches often lack connection with the audience because nobody is perfect. Perfection can even undermine the effectiveness of your message. When you share your knowledge with your audience members, there may be a doubt in their minds that the solutions that worked for you may not work for them because they may not be as savvy, confident, determined, or decisive as you are.  How can you overcome their objection that you sound special?

1. Let someone else be the Guru. You want to stress what you share with your audience because we naturally gravitate towards people like us. Don’t be afraid to talk about your failures and frustrations because we all have experienced them. Position yourself as the one who received a helpful lesson or revelation and is about to pass it on to your audience. Now, the focus of your story is less on you as the know-it-all Guru and more on your audience members – their pains, needs and desires – as well as the process that gets them where they want to be. You can call back to the Guru’s message more in your speech without sounding like you are preaching or trying to sell yourself too hard.

2. Let your audience contribute to the solution.  A sense of autonomy is a reward to the brain. Give your audience members choices, engage them by asking powerful questions, and acknowledge their input and wisdom. What questions can you ask your audience to make them reflect on your points? How can they better fine-tune and apply your strategies to their unique situations? People feel more committed to the ideas that they have helped to develop.

3. Don’t memorize your speech word-for-word. Have an outline, know your quotes and memorable expressions, and internalize what you want to say by practicing it. Don’t try to sound too formal. Don’t speak like you write. People prefer things that are easy to process. Repetition, clarity and simplicity help to build connection and trust.  “Cognitive fluency” is a measure of how easy it is to think about something:

“…studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process – even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it – can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities.”

Here is a trick to make sure you stick to the conversational language.  Instead of standing when you practice your speech, have a seat and imagine you are having a conversation with someone.  What would you say to get your point across? If your language is too formal, it will feel awkward.

4. Replace “Ladies and gentlemen” with “You.”  If you use collective phrases, such as “Ladies and gentlemen…”, “How many of you…”, “Dear friends and colleagues…”, you create a perception that you are speaking to too many people. You want each of your audience members to feel like you are speaking directly to him or her.  Look audience members in their eyes as you scan the room.  Choose words as if you are speaking to each member individually.  The word “you” is your most important word.

5. Make your physical environment warm and inviting.  Colors, smells, textures in our surroundings all affect our moods and behavior without our conscious awareness. You can’t always choose where you speak, but it is important to pay attention to the design, acoustics and seating arrangement in the room. Clear away anything that may create a barrier between you and your audience, such as lecterns, projectors, etc. Remove empty seats. Make sure everybody can see and hear you well. Use a cordless mike that allows you to move around the room and offer a mike to audience members when they ask or answer questions.

What techniques do you use to build connection with your audience?

My daughter just turned seven.  She is a joyful and easy-going child most of the time, but she is also at the age when children like to push boundaries and see what they can get away with. While she tries to exert her independence, her communications style often regresses to that of a toddler.  She may cross her arms, stomp her feet and give me this defiant look that says, “I won’t have any of it” or “Who cares?” –  which is one of her current favorite expressions.  We are looking for new ways to express ourselves with power, but without tantrums.   This includes using “strong language” instead of dramatic poses and whining whenever she makes a request or wants someone to stop doing something.

As adults, we sometimes also communicate in ways that may give us a sense of power but that are not productive. Yelling, name-calling, creating emotional outbursts, slamming doors or moving and gesturing frantically would all be examples of such false sense of power and control. Here are five better ways to express yourself powerfully and persuasively without creating unnecessary conflicts or drama:

Video link: http://youtu.be/18PBzP0D1Cc

1. Spotlight the audience to magnify your message. When you make people feel important and worthy of your full attention, they reciprocate with more trust and cooperation.  When you help them improve their social standing, their brains perceive it as a reward.  When people hear their own name, their brains show a unique pattern of activation specific to their own name in relation to the names of others.  This activation pattern is similar to the patterns reported when individuals make judgments about themselves and their personal qualities. Focus your message on your audience members, their needs, concerns and desires, and they will be more open and willing to connect to your ideas.

2. Watch and match the energy of your audience.  Is your audience laid-back, uptight, highly energetic or sluggish? Meet them where they are. Once you match their level of energy initially, you can take them where you want them to go by gradually building up the energy in the room. Conversations have their own rhythms and flow.  They may slow down or speed up, intensify or linger. Since the energy in the room will fluctuate, you shouldn’t stay on the same level throughout the whole time.  In addition, when people like one another their body language has a natural tendency to synchronize.  It helps to build rapport.  Subtle mimicry makes a good impression because it increases what’s called “sensorimotor fluency.”  If you naturally sync with the audience, it will take less effort for their brains to process what you say.

3. Co-create your message with the audience.  Your message will have more relevance and impact if you let your audience participate in developing your story and your ideas.   Autonomy is a reward to the brain.  We want to feel a sense of control and agency over our decisions. We want to have choices, to be able to predict the outcomes, and adjust our actions accordingly.  Studies show that leaders who have more responsibilities and heavier workloads actually report less anxiety and stress than non-leaders. This is likely because leaders have a heightened sense of control. We are more likely to succeed implementing solutions that we have come up with than following someone else’s advice. To increase the autonomy and engagement of your audience, ask questions and listen actively.  Invite people to share their own stories and experiences and encourage them to identify their own steps to reach the desired outcomes.  Be a facilitator of insights, not a guru.

4. Make room for silence.  Artists use the concept of “white space” to refer to the absence, or nothingness, that makes the content stand out.  White space creates balance. Silence is the white space of a conversation. It allows insights to percolate to the surface. Pauses and silence create space for reflection. Don’t spin people’s brains into a frenzy. Turn down the inflow of information to enable new connections to form. Powerful, thought-provoking, open-ended questions encourage such silent reflection.

5. Use constraints to encourage action. Constraints and obstacles can be a good thing when you need to generate creative solutions. The brain likes to conserve energy and resources and prefers the status-quo over change because change requires more mental effort and conscious awareness.  According to studies, constraints can force us to adopt a more global, “big picture” view of things, consider a greater range of possibilities, and better integrate unrelated pieces of information.  A set of rules, templates, and requirements can boost creative thinking. Another strategy to shift the brain into action is to convey a sense of urgency by setting deadlines or to use scarcity by highlighting the limited availability of something. The brain does not want to miss out on good things that bear the stamp of approval. In a consumer preference experiment, Stephen Worchel and colleagues offered subjects chocolate chip cookies in a jar and asked them to taste the cookies and rate their quality. One jar had ten cookies in it, and the other jar had just two. Subjects preferred the cookies from the jar of only two cookies, even though they were the same cookies. Seeing the cookies disappear as a result of built-up demand make them more desirable and delicious. Thus, scarcity can be a mental shortcut for quality and a powerful motivator.

Whether you speak, present or teach, you may need some superpower infusions to combat short attention spans and the multitude of distractions we are all bombarded with in any given moment.  Luckily, with the help of a few mind tricks, sprinkled with the current brain science pixie dust, you can turn your messages into attention-pulling magnets.  Here are your five brain-captivating principles to craft magical as opposed to mixed messages.

1.  Dare to care and show it.  Passion is infectious. People want to feel and see passion.  Our brains are social. We have a special set of neurons, called “mirror” neurons, to help us with our human connections. Neuroscientists are exploring whether the mirror neuron system in the brain is linked to empathy and enables us to better understand other people’s intentions, feelings, and emotions.  Emotions spread across our social networks.  When we smile at someone, chances are high that the person will smile back. Even yawning is contagious.  If you are bored with your own topic, don’t expect your audience to jump up from their seats in excitement. In contrast, if you are passionate and your body language shows it, your audience will respond with emotion.  Passion in the delivery of your message can even compensate for some deficiencies in your presentation.  It is a magical ingredient!

2.  Highlight presentation patterns. Your most important points will blaze brighter if they are set off properly.  When you prepare your presentation, think about the patterns your presentation creates rather than the usual outline of the talk.  Perhaps, we can borrow some magic from people with synesthesia, whose senses blend so that, for example, they may see colors or feel the texture of the letters they read.  If your presentation were a tapestry you wove out of the threads of your stories and messages, what would it look like?  Our brains thrive on patterns.  They are wired to recognize patterns and make predictions, based on our previous learning and experiences.  What patterns do you intend to create or break?  You can make certain messages stand out by varying the flow of your presentation and using breaks, music, visuals, activities and pauses that can give your audience the opportunity to reflect and absorb the material.  Define the white space in the structure of your presentation that makes the main points more visible and allows for the percolation of ideas to the surface.

3.  Sync minds through storytelling.  Nothing captivates the human brain more than a good story.  Stories engage us on the emotional level.  Experiences accompanied by strong emotions are more memorable.  When the story resonates with the listener, the brains of the speaker and listener may synchronize, suggesting a deeper human connection.  The best stories are co-created with your audience.  Make sure your participants can see themselves in your story and can relate to the characters and their journeys. Your story can provide hooks for the participants to hang their own assumptions, beliefs, fears, and hopes.  We all suffer from the so called the “egocentric bias” – we think we know better. Asking the audience to take perspectives of different characters in your story may help them overcome this bias and be more receptive to other points of view. The more your participants feel the ownership of the story, the more they become invested in its development and success.

4.  Misdirect and provoke.  At the core of every joke are frustrated expectations. Humor jolts the brain by planting predictions and then cleverly violating them.  When we are surprised or caught off guard, we pay more attention.  We want to make sense of the situation to feel more in control. Humor elevates our mood, and positive mood has been found to enhance creative problem solving. In addition to humor, good questions offer a way to provoke your participants into thinking differently.  Use open-ended questions, which start with who, what, when, how, where to open possibilities. Ask people to offer examples or experiences that contradict their own current way of thinking. You can’t change other people’s minds, but you can “confuse” them enough that they might change their own.

5.  Work behind the scenes to direct the spotlight. Our physical environment is a silent decision-maker that influences perceptions and judgment. Just like a magician can manipulate the scene to make the audience shift its attention to something while a watch disappears from the wrist of an unsuspecting volunteer, the presenter can use smells, colors, sounds, and textures to influence the moods and minds of the audience. For example, playing a piece of music while the audience gathers can set the mood for your presentation. A moderate-level of ambient noise (about 70 decibels) enhances creative problem-solving and may even lead to a greater adoption of innovative products. The smell of peppermint or rosemary can help people pay attention to details while lavender oil promotes relaxation. Cacao activates the production of endorphins that make us happy.  I once attended the Rubin Museum of Art Brainwave series, in which neuroscientist David Linden talked about his book “The Compass of Pleasure” while master chocolatier Jacques Torres provided the audience with his mouthwatering chocolate samples. (You can watch the video here, alas no chocolates.) Thus, the cognitive pursuit of pleasure was magnified by the gustatory pursuit. Create a multisensory experience for your audience, and it will make your messages more memorable.

What is your favorite mind trick to get a point across?