Crystal Clear Communication

How to Explain Anything Clearly in Speech or Writing

Dr. Gary S. Goodman

• Editore: G&D Media
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781722522919
• Argomento: Business
• Categoria: Business Communication

MAKE AN IMPACT WITH CRYSTAL CLEAR COMMUNICATION

Communication that's precise and clear goes far beyond the spoken or written word - it actually changes lives! That's precisely why best-selling author Dr. Gary Goodman wrote Crystal Clear Communication: How to Explain Anything Clearly in Speech or Writing.

In this book, you'll find the tools, the techniques, and, just as importantly, the unflinching confidence to influence people decisively - both at work and at home. Use it at work to command attention, to lead your team, to drive your point home. Use it at home to strengthen your marriage, improve your friendships, and simply become a better parent.

You will learn:

• How to begin with a crystal-clear mind.
• How to quiet your thoughts, be level-headed and dispassionate.
• How to size up your audience and appeal to any reader or listener.
• How to think through what you want to convey and get your point across clearly, every time.
• How to avoid procrastination.
• How to successfully sell a product, service or idea.
• How to overcome writer's block.
• How to overcome stage fright

Become a great communicator and change your life, now.

Chapter One

Begin with a Crystal clear Mind

It’s one thing to urge you to create crystal clear communications, but what if you simply aren’t ready to get down to business?

It’s very possible you haven’t quieted your mind to be in the proper mood to write or to speak effectively.

Possibly you haven’t truly clarified your intentions. What is my point? Do I have one main idea I want to express, or many? Which one(s) are critical?

Am I in the proper frame of mind to communicate, or am I preoccupied with something else? Am I bristling with defensiveness when I should be level-headed and dispassionate? Have I sufficiently thought through what I hope to convey clearly?

Maybe you’re waiting too long—procrastinating.

A number of practical or psychological factors might also be blocking your path to achievement. If so, you can’t be expected to roar down the highway of ideas without clearing the way.

If you’re like most folks, you might be burdened by fears and anxieties. Often called writer’s block and stage fright, these and other widespread forms of communication apprehension might be keeping you from comfortably and clearly speaking out or composing your thoughts in writing.

According to Stanford research, fully 80 percent of Americans are shy in some circumstances. Shyness could be retarding your development. According to a much-quoted bestseller, The Book of Lists, speaking in public is a fear that most people rank above the fear of death!

So before we get into the do’s and don’ts of crafting your message, shaping it for specific readers and listeners, making it solid, we need to make you solid, stripping away the concerns that even very gifted communicators have about how they come across.

Conquering State Fright

First, let’s tackle stage fright. Stage fright, the fear of speaking in public or communicating verbally in someone else’s immediate presence, afflicts millions of people.

Where does this fear come from? And what can we do about it?

There are several possible sources of speech apprehension. We’ll explore three of them:

1. We may have no significant experience speaking to groups.

2. We imagine the worst possible outcomes: fainting dead away at a podium, moving our lips and having nothing come out, hearing our voices crack, speaking gibberish, and having people laugh not at our jokes but at us.

3. Ego is a problem at both extremes of the continuum. If we lack a strong one, suffering from low self-esteem, we’ll believe we haven’t earned the right to speak, feeling that we’re impostors. And if we think we’re top guns in the speaking world, there is always a fear lurking that this time, when we reach the sound barrier, we won’t soar to war speed but crash and burn.

Let’s look at these problems and see what we can do to cure them.

First, what can you do if you don’t have much public speaking experience? That’s easy. Get more now! You can take public-speaking classes and volunteer for opportunities that force you to deliver reports and interact before groups.

How can we avoid imagining awful outcomes? That’s pretty easy too. With more experience, you’ll find out that few of the horrible things that you have paraded across the screen of your imagination ever occur.

Your voice will work, perhaps somewhat quietly at first; still, it will perform as designed.

You won’t faint away, hyperventilating with chest pains. If you remember to breathe in advance, you will avoid oxygen debt—that shallowness of breath that has you racing desperately to catch yours.

If you can remember to smile at your group, they will generally return the favor. That will relax you, and if you flub up a bit, they’ll give you supportive feedback.

Plus—and this is key, so please do yourself the favor of remembering it—YOU WILL NEVER APPEAR AS NERVOUS TO OTHERS AS YOU DO TO YOURSELF. Only you can hear that heart thumping in your chest, and only you feel the clamminess of your hands. Now that you do, forget about them.

Which leads me to the point about ego. Typically, when we’re experiencing a fear of failure, we are fixated on the wrong thing: ourselves. When you’re about to speak, try to adopt a “We do it all for you” attitude (to borrow from a fast-food chain’s slogan). When you focus on your message, you deemphasize yourself, and your audience will respond accordingly.

But one of my ultimate tips is to RELAX UNTIL IT IS TOO LATE!

Keynote speakers, top salespeople, and big-time athletes face a similar challenge.

How do you get up for the game and get ready to do your best without nervously dissipating your energy or overvaluing the idea of winning at any cost? In other words, how can you stay loose? How can you keep the fun in the experience instead of turning it into a gut-wrenching drag?

Something that that works for me is to monitor my nerves. When they get too jittery, this cues me to take the next step, which is to remind myself to get nervous later, not now.

I don’t put myself down for getting the butterflies, which is an easy trap to fall into for a professional keynote speaker and sales coach. In effect, I say to myself, “Of course you want to feel nervous, and you’ll get your chance later, closer to kickoff time.”

Then something marvelous happens. I really relax. I enjoy myself. I enhance my upcoming event with some new twists. I might even decide to add a new celebrity impression (say, Sean Connery) to my “act.” Of course, while all of this relaxing and fun prep are going on, the clock is ticking away, and I’m not sweating it.

Then it’s thirty seconds until I’m on, and guess what? It’s too late to worry!

This has worked for me so many times, in so many settings, that I feel it is nearly foolproof.

Try it for yourself, and please tell me how you do!

Appreciate this: even professionals sweat a little!

Ask experienced actors and speakers if they are at least a little nervous before an event, and typically they’ll reply: “Of course; that never completely goes away!” Many will add these crucial words: “And if I don’t have at least a few butterflies in my stomach, then something is wrong, and I run the risk of giving a flat performance.”

One more thing: use an audience grabber to start your talk.

“One in two people between the ages of fifty-five and seventy-five will need long-term care in a nursing facility or at home, with the assistance of a nurse or other health-services provider.

“Some will break their hips and others may develop Alzheimer’s, but still, the statistic is one in two.

“How many of you have a long-term care health plan in place that enables you to choose to be treated in your own home or in a facility of your choice?

“How many of you can afford the hundreds of dollars a day, $6000 per month and more, year after year without selling most if not all of your assets or becoming a burden to your families?”

Before you get swept up in responding to these devices, let me say that I’ve just exposed you to two great ways of opening a speech: (1) the startling statistic and (2) the direct question.

Here I’ve blended them, but you could use either one to grab your audience’s attention. And that word definitely applies to the use of a special technique to begin your talk: you want to develop a grabber. Ideally, this will snap people out of the doldrums and focus their attention right away. Moreover, especially if you’re in a commercial setting and your purpose is to sell, these tools help you to establish a need and its significance right off the bat.

Most well-prepared speakers will have statistics and questions somewhere in their talks, but somewhere isn’t good enough. They need to be strategically placed.

For example, the other evening I was assessing the skills of a group of financial-services marketers that use the platform to sell senior citizens—you guessed it—long-term health care. But instead of placing the devices in the right place, they erred by burying them in the body of the talk.

That statistic—that one in two will need this care—is attention-getting. Why wait until you’re a half-hour into the chat to mention it?

Journalists call this habit of inserting the juiciest morsel too late burying the lead, and watchful editors catch this flaw over and again.

By making sure that you have a strategic grabber, you’ll avoid this mistake, make the most of your research and your subject, and be much more persuasive and successful with audiences.

Plus, when you see your audience is with you from the start, responding to your content with keen interest, your stage fright will quickly evaporate, to be replaced by calm and steady self-assurance.

Writer’s Block: The Sword of Disapproval

As a toddler, I’d scribble with very serious intent and then whisk my document to my mom for her appraisal.

“Ah,” she’d say. “Very nice.”

I’d return reinforced and emboldened to my ultra-important ministrations.

At some point my older brother and sister would amble along, grab the sheet from my hand, and wisecrack, “Someday this will mean something!”

And their point was…?

I’m still trying to impress with my writing. (It helps to know the alphabet.) But if I become overly concerned with how people are responding to my work, I cut back on my production, which is probably what my siblings had in mind.

If we let that happen, we’re succumbing to writer’s block. Unabated, that impulse to please can completely squeeze off our creative spigots.

Wanting to spread happiness and cheer seems quite natural, and to this day, when I am complimented on my books and articles, my heart soars. But seeking a reward of this kind leads to doom.

When we give people the power to praise, we also give them the sword of disapproval to wield above our heads. When someone becomes a reward source, they also become a potential punisher.

A bad word, or a kind one withheld, can send us careening down a Grand Canyon of self-doubt. While we’re decoding what they are telling us, ferreting out truths in their text and tone, we’re running from the next page that needs to be written.

Pleasing and writing simultaneously is impossible. Choose one or the other. But be warned: if you choose to please, you’re also very possibly choosing a writer’s block.

Did Your Teachers Contribute to Your Writer’s Block?

I suspect there are two kinds of writers: (1) those that were schooled by language teachers and (2) those that were schooled despite language teachers.

I’m a teacher, so I would not minimize the importance of teachers. They are so crucial to our development that having bad ones is a special curse. Fortunately, many recover.

For instance, I know a foreign-born American whose English teacher in her native country predicted: “You’ll never learn this language!”

Nice comment, right?

The student became fluent in English, thank you very much! She learned despite the negative influence of her teacher.

Many of us learn to write professionally in the same way. We’ve received standard or substandard instruction, but our desire to excel strips away the barnacles of self-doubt that were attached to our skimpy skiffs when we first set sail. Leaving the brutish harbor of academia, we venture out to a placid sea of relatively grand achievement.

My first journalism professor flunked me in publicity and gave me a meager C in feature writing. I went on to become a best-selling author of thirty books, more than 1500 articles, and other items too many to recount here,

And my instructor—what became of her? Nothing notable, but I suspect she came across my name here and there or heard me on radio or watched me on TV.

If you suffer from writer’s block, it may be traceable to your early influences, and especially to incapable or mean-spirited instructors. I suggest you perform a mental feat called recapitulation. Anthropologist Carlos Castaneda describes this in his books as mentally reviewing all of the people you’ve known, breathing in what you recall of what was said between you, and then dispatching those memories to oblivion with an out breath. According to Castaneda, this practice will dissipate the negative charge that they injected into your life.

Start with your language and communications teache...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction and Overview
• Chapter 1: Begin with a Crystal clear Mind
• Chapter 2: The Art of Preparing Crystal clear Messages
• Chapter 3: Secrets of Appealing to Any Listener or Reader
• Chapter 4: Special Communication Challenges and Circumstances
• Chapter 5: Staying Positive
• Chapter 6: Script Your Success