Communication Under Fire

I recently spoke to communications expert Neil Gordon about his best advice on communicating during times of crisis and much more.

Adam: First things first, how did you break into the communications coaching business? 

Neil: It really started way back when I got my first editing job at Penguin, the book publishing company, in that I was floating around for the first five or so years after college and didn't really have much direction, but I found myself being a rather devoted reader of books going back to around right after I graduated from college, which is in great contrast to how I was growing up. I actually hated reading. So I started with hating reading, and then I graduated from college and moved to New York City and needed to find escape from the subways. And at the time, I was under the influence of a friend of mine who was an avid reader and he turned me on to certain books. And one book in particular called A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving; that book really got to me. It just disrupted my worldview and my understanding of what life was and all of that. And so I went through a real angsty time, what's it all mean, kind of 20-Something thing that, frankly, a lot of us probably go through at that time in our lives. And on the other side of it, I just read everything I could find just to figure out how the written word could have the impact that it did. And then I got the job at Penguin and that got me started. I actually went there thinking that I was most interested in fiction, but it was during my time at Penguin I found that I had a greater affinity for nonfiction; how-to books and that sort of thing. And I was only there for a few years. And I struck out on my own after that and was a struggling freelancer for about 10 years before solving the larger marketing problem that I had in shifting, really, from just being a struggling freelancer to being more of an entrepreneur, as recently as 2017.

Adam: Can you describe the core of your practice? What do you actually do for people?

Neil: Yeah, a lot of people think of the people who might consider themselves thought leaders. These are the types of people who write nonfiction books. They are public speakers, they might have a podcast they might have, they might be guests on podcasts, be speaking at summits and all sorts of things where their main purpose is to somehow help people to solve problems in a different way than what's typical. So to give you something a bit more concrete; you're a business leader. You're an actual leader; let's say you're CEO of a company, and you are running your company, you're managing your C-suite executives and your senior executives and whatnot, and they're managing their teams and whatnot, and you're steering the ship towards some sort of profit; some sort of business outcome, serving shareholders and stakeholders and all of that. That means that you're a business leader, but you become a thought leader, if you're that same person, and you realize that there's a fundamentally different way to run a business and you want to get the word out to other people at conferences, and in writing a book and whatnot. There's a different way to solve this problem of how to run an effective business. And so an example of that might be Ed Catmull, who is the co-founder of Pixar with John Lasseter, and he wrote a book called Creativity, Inc. a handful of years ago, and he became a thought leader instead of just a business leader when he set out to get a message out into the world. What was it about Pixar culture that made it so productive and created such amazing movies and whatnot by shifting from just running the company to getting the word out. That means he's more of a thought leader. And so my work is to help people like that; to distill their message down to something truly powerful; the kind of thing that people retweet or the kind of thing that they highlight in the Kindle edition of their ebook or whatever it is, and then build out whole books and speeches and all other sorts of content from that clarity.

Adam: Has your work changed since the Coronavirus crisis?

Neil: That's a good question. What's interesting is that I look at my experience with Coronavirus as actually something that I like to advise people on as well, which means to go through various layers of pivoting. And so when I started this year, right before Coronavirus took shape, I was primarily marketing to public speakers and with sheltering in place and all that, obviously we can't go and do live events like we could do just a couple months ago. And so having marketing and marketing funnels and whatnot all about the things you need to do to be a better public speaker suddenly weren't going to work as well. Interestingly, they work better than I expected them to. But in the first month or so of the Coronavirus crisis, I got less and less traction with that kind of marketing message. And what I did right when it struck was I pivoted my message for the very short term, which was speaking to how, if you're a public speaker, then your gig was probably just cancelled, and what do you do to give better virtual presentations? So that was the very short term. And right now I'm in the slightly more middle term pivoting around helping people with some of my other materials, not just about speaking, but about writing books. And so now I'm focusing on that. And as I move forward, I will be pivoting even more deeply to perhaps help people with their marketing. I have a lot of followers who are coaches and consultants and whatnot. And they're looking to figure out how to get cut through all the noise, how to get more people to work with them, even in just like a one on one consulting or coaching capacity. And so my skills and my methodologies can help to really create effective marketing. So I haven't done this yet, but I'll have yet another deeper level pivot in perhaps helping people to solve more fundamental problems that aren't just about speaking or writing books but something else. And so things have been different since Coronavirus, but they haven't necessarily been less effective because of the agility I've forced myself to have in responding to what's out there right now.

Adam: What should leaders understand about how to communicate during times of crisis?

Neil: I really appreciate them because this is something that we can use. This crisis is a way to learn about what I'm about to talk about, and it still winds up being relevant. In the bigger scheme of things when this issue ultimately resolves itself, it'll be something I'll want people to still keep in mind. Let's think about an employee who usually comes to the office. They do their job, and then they go home at the end of the day and that's the way things are. Let's say they have a couple of kids. Let's say there are a lot of other things going on as a result of the crisis taking place in their lives. The biggest mistake that leaders could make at this time is to glance over the new and even intense nature of the problems that their employees are now facing. As in, if they're communicating with their team, and let's say a manager is starting a meeting or something like that and it's just a business-as-usual transaction. Alright, what do you got for us this week or whatever; however, they might start the meeting. Usually, the person who is at home is dealing with a whole other level of stressors. They're dealing with kids knocking on their home office door, they're dealing with the strain of being shoved into their house and family members being at each other's throats and all of that, and they're also dealing with the larger fear around the economic uncertainty that's now pervasive throughout the country and the world. And they're also dealing with that larger fear around the possibility that they might get infected, or someone they know and love might get infected. So there are all of these layers of stressors of problems that any given employee is now dealing with. The worst thing that they could do as leaders is to just glance past that at the beginning of meetings or in their mass communications or something like that, and not even address it. Then the flip side of that; the best thing that they can ultimately do is simply acknowledge it: give the employees an opportunity to be heard, to acknowledge what they're experiencing, and even perhaps create some sort of questionnaire if it's a larger company. Create a little questionnaire; what kind of things are you guys dealing with right now? And then, in the mass communication, offer some light and accessible tips or solutions as to how to resolve those kinds of things. Be a source of guidance, even though it's not really in the description of the company to help the employees in that way. If the employee feels heard and seen in the problems that they're facing, they're that much more likely to settle down, which will of course help with their focus and they'll also remember that their employer has their back.

Adam: More broadly speaking, what are your best tips for leaders on how to communicate effectively?

Neil: So if we look at best communication practices, as being in the world of leadership, right, we're talking about business leaders and people like that, right? If a person is in this kind of environment wanting to communicate then in theory what they're aiming to do is to persuade people of their ideas. It might be the CEO of a company wanting to get their team to get invested and engaged in tackling a new project, or it might be a startup looking to persuade a venture capitalist firm in becoming an investor or an angel investor or something like that. Or in even a non-business setting; there are people out there who are just looking to persuade others of the viability of their ideas and what I can offer is a very basic framework, Adam, that can be used in lots of different settings like a signature talk, the introduction of a book, or a slide deck pitch or something like that. But it also can actually fit very nicely in just becoming a new way that we can look at an elevator speech; like a quick 30 seconds or one minute way that we can convey our work or our company or the idea we have or something like that. So the mistake that most people make is that they delve right into their solutions and their stuff. So if you're a company, you just talk about the products or services you offer that sort of thing. And what you can do instead of that is, first, start with the problem that your company offers to ultimately help people to solve. So if you're a business consultant, who helps fledgling startups to find early adopters of their products, what you could start with is instead of just talking about being a business consultant, right out the gate, you could start with, “So there are a lot of startups who are at risk of going out of business before they've even gotten started because they can't find early adopters of their products. Right?” So you set up the problem and the next step is you identify typical solutions. You identify the myths that are out there as to how to solve that problem, how to achieve the goals that you're talking about. So in this startup example, you might say, what they're struggling with is to find early adopters. What most startups falsely do is that they just paper the local market for anyone and everyone as a way to get more awareness for their brand and all of that. Then you introduce your solution as a departure from that conventional wisdom. And then you say, “Instead of doing what people typically do to solve this problem, here's what I have them do instead.” You might even distill all of your work down to an essential idea. I call it the silver bullet. Like when you look at books and talks and stuff like that there's often one powerpack sentence that is sort of like your secret sauce; your recipe for your success. So you provide that, then you describe your solution a little bit more. In those four parts- the problem, typical solutions, your secret sauce or silver bullet, and then a more fleshed out explanation of your solution that creates a kind of flow- it engages people to really become invested in the problem you help others to solve, instead of hitting them over the head with your solution.

Adam: Neil, what is your best advice for people who are relatively new to public speaking or who may struggle with public speaking on how to become effective public speakers?

Neil: I appreciate the question, Adam, because it relates partly to what I was just describing in the flow of that elevator speech, in that what people really get precious about in public speaking is often their methodology. And again, this comes right back to what we're talking about with elevator speeches with going right into your solutions. Speakers do this too and you can actually create a tremendous amount of agility in your speaking and speak to a lot of different audiences if you become more expert at what any given audience's problems are. So if you have like a secret sauce for how to solve certain problems and, on the one hand, you're speaking to a group of doctors and, on another hand, you're speaking to a group of entrepreneurs and, on another hand, you're speaking to a bunch of stay-at-home moms, in theory, you could say you'd have to write a whole different speech for all of those different audiences. But if you have some fundamental idea like a secret sauce, and how to solve problems in that more foundational way, you could then, with a tremendous amount of agility, adapt your talk from one audience to the next, to the next simply by framing your talk in terms of that particular audience's problems. So if you are speaking to doctors about how to respond to COVID-19, then you might speak to how much fear they have around the exposure to the illness and how if you're not essential to solving that, how your cash flow might be down and whatnot, and then you could speak to your secret sauce in attracting people to your work, something like that. But then if you're an entrepreneur, you could speak to a different set of problems around how much noise there is in the marketplace, and you need to really stand out and then you provide them with your secret sauce in that context. So if I was to give aspiring public speakers one piece of advice, it's just to become a super expert in the problem that any given audience has, and then speak to that before introducing your expertise.

Adam: What, what are your tips on how public speakers or people who are new to public speaking can overcome their fear of public speaking?

Neil: That's a good question, Adam. There are a lot of different ways we can look at this. Because my expertise has always been in the realm of content, what I've always put an emphasis on is less so the kind of exercises we can do. There are simple breathing exercises where you can inhale. If you're about to go on stage, you can inhale for maybe three, then count to three and exhale for the count of six. And you just do these nice full breaths from your diaphragm. And that can help you to regulate your nervous system a bit. And so I don't want to in any way diminish the value of those kinds of techniques. It's just not where I specifically speak to the most. What I do to help people overcome their fear is to actually, really help them to own their value through what I was calling the silver bullet earlier and a flow to their talk that really is meant to be truly from a place of service in regards to how their audience relates to it. So in other words, by truly owning your value, and knowing how much it's going to help the people who hear about it, you're going to then be able to shift your perspective and your mindset to be less about “oh my god, I'm about to speak in front of a whole bunch of people,” to more like, “oh, wow, I've got so much value here. I can't wait to share that value with all of these people.” So by owning your value you're going to find yourself being much more willing to be in front of others because you know how much you're going to get across to them and how much they're going to get out of it. I like to say that effective communication values the recipient over the sender, and so owning your value in that way will help you to show up in greater service to your audience, which will help you overcome that fear.

Adam: What are your best tips for seasoned speakers on how they can take their public speaking skills to the next level?

Neil: Yeah, that's a very, very good question. What I find out about them is that even speakers with whom I've worked, who've made $2,530 or $50,000 per speaking gig, what I find is that they have a lot of ownership of the more expanded version of their expertise where if they have like five or seven steps in how to solve a problem, they might make their talk about all five or seven of those steps. It's well-meaning but I ultimately feel it’s a misguided way to approach a 30 or 45 or 60 minute talk. I like to say to these more expert speakers to treat their content less like a condensed version of a book they might write and more like just the introduction of their book. So what I often wind up doing with them is helping them to distill their work to that one sentence and to give you a more precise idea what this is. We can circle back to Ed Catmull and his book, Creativity, Inc., that I mentioned earlier. About a quarter of the way through the book, Ed describes the entirety of, maybe it was like 80,000 or 100,000 words- I don't know how long the book is, but it was it was a good full-length book- and about a quarter of the way through he distills the entire book back down to one sentence; he distills the essence of the whole work culture at Pixar down to one sentence where he says, getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right. And so he leads into that saying that you could have a terrible team with a great idea and they will screw it up, or you can have a great team with a mediocre idea and they could either make it better or come up with a whole other idea entirely. So, to Ed's tremendous credit, he figured out a way to distill his entire thing down to that one sentence. So to circle back to your original question, Adam, an expert speaker can take that sentence once they’ve found it, and strategically place it in a certain part of their talk so it builds up to that “Aha!” moment, that secret sauce kind moment, and becomes sort of like a climactic moment of their speech. So their speech follows almost like the journey of a film or the hero's journey or something like that, where it builds and builds and builds. You have that “Aha!” moment and then you provide them with next steps from that “Aha!” moment. So as a side note, as of our conversation today, I think nearly 8,000 people have highlighted that one sentence in Ed's book, to emphasize how when someone has an “Aha!” moment, they're truly empowered. And if you create the kind of context in your speech to have that “Aha!” moment, then you will truly be able to empower your audience and attract a lot of people to your movement.

Adam: More broadly speaking, what are your best tips for leaders, entrepreneurs, and professional speakers?

Neil: I would like to say that a big thing that people really get precious about in regards to their messaging and their content is the words that they actually use. I even just described that silver bullet concept and quoted word for word what Ed wrote in that book, but the truth is, we can get as precious as we want about our messaging in our content, but the value of our message is not based on what we say or write. It's actually what our audience does once we're done saying it. The entire thing is driven not by what we do and what we say, but rather the impact that our words and actions have. So at a very high level, what I really encourage our listeners to do is to think about how whatever they say and do is ultimately going to impact their audience, and if they become more of an expert at having that positive impact, they will have a far more powerful brand, and they will have far more powerful growth in everything they do. My entire world changed, Adam, when I suddenly realized how to solve my marketing problem by helping out speakers. When I realized the kind of pain that speakers are in, and how I could serve them and help them out of that pain and have that kind of impact, my entire life as an entrepreneur changed. So I became more of an expert on how to have a more powerful impact on people as you can. Help them and everything else will fall into place from that.

Adam: Zoom has become a very popular tool for communication. What are your best tips on effectively using Zoom and other forms of video chat for people who are communicating in a business setting?

Neil: Sure, and we can look at this in a couple of contexts, Adam. If you're just having a conversation one on one or one to a couple of people, one thing that you can think about doing is placing more focus on looking at your camera. I have two little gold stars on either side of the webcam built into my laptop and it's just a little reminder to bring my eyes there and, as much as you can, if somebody is talking to you actually, look at the camera while listening, and it will help them to feel a little more connected to you like you are listening. Even if you're looking at them on the screen and listening very intently and smiling and visually responding, you could have an even greater impact on your presence if you're looking at the camera directly. If you're presenting in a virtual presentation, as a one to many kind of thing, then I actually encourage you to take like a blank Word document and put it over your Zoom screen and actually cut out any sort of visual stimulation from the Zoom platform and only look at the camera while you're talking. Now if you're giving a presentation that has slides and you're doing a screen share and all of that, then I still encourage you to look at the camera as much as you can instead of just following the screen. Sort of like how you might look at the audience and then your slides every once in a while when presenting live. I encourage you to still look at the camera while presenting so that if you have that little thumbnail of you presenting in the corner of the screen, that you are looking at the camera, which helps the audience to feel more engaged with you.

Adam: Do you have any other last tips or thoughts that you would like to share?

Neil: I would like to say that on the whole, that the person with the marketing ultimately is going to run the table in all of this as we find our way out of the COVID-19 crisis. And as we get back to normal and there's a lot of noise I really encourage our listeners to put the time and energy and possibly even financial resources into solving their marketing problem, because that's ultimately going to be the thing that sets people apart, and the most valuable thing that they can do in having effective marketing circles back to what we originally talked about at the beginning of the call, is that the value of your marketing- the effectiveness of your marketing- will come down to how effectively you understand your audience's pain. Not even the root cause problem that you understand that they have, but the problem is they believe it. I like to say, does your marketing communication past the trudge to the bathroom test? As in, when you wake up in the morning, and you trudge to the bathroom, to wash your face and do your business and everything, you're thinking about the things you need to do that day, you're thinking about the problems that are haunting you. Maybe it's how you are going to get more business, how your family is driving you crazy and sheltering in place. Whatever it is, those are the things that are weighing on you and your marketing will be effective if you're speaking to those particular problems as your audience understands they have them and that will pretty much make or break your effectiveness in moving forward with your work in the months to come.