 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. And welcome to another edition of Legable Science. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, here on Think Tech Hawaii. Legable Science is all about how science is a vital, interesting, and indeed entertaining part of our lives, and how we can use science to make our lives better. Today, here in the studio, I have Pam Chambers with me to talk about a really critical aspect. We're going to talk about the psychology of public presentations. And Pam has just written a wonderful book, Life is a Presentation. And the thesis of this book, well, Pam, why don't you go ahead and... Thank you. The thesis is that the minute we leave home, even before that, we are presenting ourselves to those around us. We're presenting ourselves to our family, to our neighbors, to our coworkers, to drivers on the road. We're always out there somehow. And so asking for a certain table at a restaurant is a presentation. Asking someone on a date is a presentation. And standing on a stage with a microphone is a presentation. But I wanted my students and clients to understand that we're always presenting ourselves, and so that's the title. Life is a presentation. And indeed, I should point out, Pam is an author, a public speaker, not only an author of this book, but she's also written several other books, Speak for Yourself, Stand and Deliver, Public Speaking Made Easy, which was a bestseller, I guess, here in Hawaii. And you've got another book now coming out, too. Yes, it's called Not This Again, and it's about 18 common challenges that business leaders in Hawaii face, and how to overcome those challenges. Very specific to Hawaii. OK, that sounds wonderful. Pam does a lot of things. She consults one-on-one. She coaches people one-on-one. She runs group classes that are open to the public. Sometimes a sort of single workshop, sometimes a whole series, right? And can work with individuals, watch their presentations, give them feedback after that, and work with them to improve public speaking. All of that is right. Thank you. And Pam was named by Honolulu Magazine as one of Hawaii's 10 most admired women. She is really the person who people look to for public speaking. And this is really a good point you make throughout this book and in the recent, when you presented to the Speaker's Association, was that public speaking is really very much an engagement phenomenon, right? Just as it is when you and I are talking, when you're talking to your family or a co-worker, you're engaging with an audience. And the same sort of rules apply, right? The same sort of rules that we think about for public speaking actually apply to these same... to all human... I think they should, but I mean, I can recall many public speaking classes that I've taken where they teach the speaker how to speak. But they don't say anything about their relationship with the audience, how to get them involved with their audience, how to get their audience involved with them. And so that becomes a, I speak, you listen exercise, which is pretty lonely for the speaker and scary, too. Yeah, and it's fundamentally less effective, right? Yeah, I can tell. If the audience perceives that the speaker is this being over there and they are an audience here, that's a psychological divide. And instead, you spoke of ways to engage audience, show up early, talk to the people ahead of time, ask them questions. Right, and let them ask questions during. You know that model that says, Pam will speak for 20 minutes and then there will be a 10-minute Q&A at the end. I say, no, no, no, don't divide it that way, because if people have a burning question and they're not allowed to ask it, it stifles them and they may forget their question, they may lose interest in their question, it's not natural. Right, where at the very least they'll be thinking about their question, not paying attention to what you're now saying, right? They'll be mulling their question and what you have said in the past. And it's just so controlling of a person to say, don't you talk until I've saved time for you to talk. It's just not natural. Right, it's not at all dialogue in any sense. It's a very contrived, highly sort of artificially structured system. And what you want instead is much more a free exchange with the audience, but if you're doing your presentation, of course, more of exchange comes from you presumably. Right, I mean you're in the driver's seat, we hope, the whole time. I think a lot of speakers are afraid of all that could happen, such as too many questions from the audience or an irrelevant question. Or maybe there's a know-it-all that now takes over. Or someone who asks something just ridiculously impossible to answer. So the speaker is afraid of all those things happening, therefore let's keep it way over there. Right, and you in this book, in Life as a Presentation, talk about a number of the techniques to use to deal with, yes, the person asked the difficult question, the hostile audience member, when the audience starts looking bored and turning away. Thank you for reading the book, Ethan. No, I loved your story about giving the talk and half-two-thirds of the way into the talk, suddenly you see people starting to leave. I thought you're, well, you dealt with it, it was great rather than just ignoring it, pretending it's not happening. Well, it started to irritate me. The more irritated a speaker becomes, the fewer tools become available because the emotion takes over. And I just could not stand to see one more person heading for the auditorium door. So I said, halt before anyone moves another muscle, tell me why you're leaving, tell me what's going on. And someone said, well, a number of us have another assembly that we must attend. And I said, good, take one minute, those of you who have to leave, do it now. Door, door, do it now. And then there was no one else leaving after that. Right, you had a smaller but committed group now, right? Yes, a smaller group that wanted to be there instead of a bigger group trying to escape. Exactly, exactly. Lots of people don't realize the sort of myriad subtle signals that we give out that really determine how well we're engaging, everything from eye contact to tone of voice to our posture, our gestures. Can you speak a little bit about how you've used these in public presentations and how some of them apply to sort of wall interactions? Oh, well, sure, I mean, the first thing I wanna say is a lot of people ask me, they say, I don't know what to do with my hands. When I'm up in front of a group, I just don't know what to do with these things. And I say, well, that's odd. You know what to do with them the rest of the day. Why does this suddenly become a problem? And it's because they're too self-conscious. So they're thinking about their hands, their hair, their outfit, their this, their that, instead of focusing on the other people which now suddenly removes all self-consciousness. So yes, I think we should learn about body language, but I don't think that we should be obsessed with what is happening with our own body while we're up there. Right, and it's very instructive to practice a presentation and videotape that, right? And you can watch and see what your posture is, what you're swapping there, what you're smiling. Yeah, so you could say, I never noticed that I did that so much. Or men might notice, I never noticed how often I stood in a fig leaf position which is this protect the crotch position which is a natural thing for someone to do if they feel threatened, but it makes them look weak. So they need to notice that they do that and then cut it out. Right, it's really, it is phenomenally instructive to watch yourself, you know, watch a videotape of yourself giving a talk and you rapidly pick up on, I hadn't realized, I tend to do, you know, small, narrow gestures. My wife bless her heart, keep saying, no, big, directed gesture, much better. Yeah, good. But. And then some people wonder about how much space they should use in front of the room. Should you pace? And I say only pace if you're showing what pacing looks like. Now use the space, yes, but there has to be purpose to your movement. So there has to be a reason that you move over to that side of the room and back again to this side. And that reason could be a look simply to connect with more people in the audience. But, you know, that professorial look, pacing look, gazing at the floor, that's not what we're gonna be doing. I had a friend of mine who talked about doing a psychology experiment in college when their professor was a pacer. And they all got together in class and agreed that when he was on one side of the room they would all pay attention and take notes. And when he went the other side, they'd all sit around and look bored. Within a while, within a matter of a few weeks, they had trained this professor to stand in one corner basically and talk from one corner of the room. And he was not at all aware of it. Oh, that's amazing, that's great. There's also the importance of the audience's body language. But like what you were just saying, there was an experiment where a singer sang on two different occasions, an opera singer. And the audience was instructed to lean back, look away, roll their eyes and not be engaged. And they recorded her singing. And then the second night, the audience was instructed to lean in, pay attention, nod approvingly, and then they compared those two recordings. And you can imagine which one was better. Right, yeah, absolutely. So we, one single audience member can help that speaker. Sure, sure. And it really is oftentimes that dynamic is really critical. It turns out that people who watch a video of a musical performance without actually hearing the music can more accurately judge the quality of that musical performance than people actually watching the video and hearing the performance. Wow. Because apparently, I got thinking about this the other day after reading your book, it's the same thing that they are probably picking up cues from the audience, very subtle cues which they wouldn't pick up. Well, that makes sense. They would listen to the music. Sure, right. And are judging the audience's reaction in some sense and judging the performance on that basis. Yeah, it was a very surprising finding, held with musicians as well as regular people. Huh. We should talk a little bit about, if we could, about why people are so afraid of public speaking. Sure, it's a number one public fear, number one phobia. Right, public speaking, snakes and spiders, dentists, deaths. And so, I always knew that it was something about the fear of being evaluated, judged and evaluated and possibly rejected. But then I got another insight and that was the fact that we as animals, we're still animals, are afraid of being separated from the herd. Because when we're separate from the herd, we are vulnerable to attack. And so, if I'm sitting at a conference table, that's safe burr, then standing up and being separate from the people at the conference table. Because now the predator can get me. That's right, I mean, that's why you see schools of fish, of flocks, of burrows, are beautifully tightly-formed packs. Right, and the inside ones are the safest. Yeah, you want to be in the middle of that. And the, this fear manifests itself in your stomach gets tight and queasy and your palms start sweating and your hands start shaking. And we were talking a little bit before this show about learning to interpret that because that reaction is a very normal reaction to getting ready to do anything. Your body is sort of switching from an even-healed mode to a fight-or-flight mode, ready to do something big basically. Either get out there and fight-or-hunt or run. Yes. That shift is a major physiological shift. Your system is sort of closing down, you're putting more blood to your peripheral muscles. Exactly. But different people take that different ways. People feel that as nervousness and get very upset and panicked about it and get violently ill or whatever. But the classic other group are football players who stand around in the locker room all feeling the same thing ahead of time, but they interpret it as they're getting pumped for the big game, right? They're getting psyched for it. And they take this very positive attitude towards it. And it's exactly the same reaction. If you measure it, you'll find they're doing the same things. A big adrenaline rush is basically happening and it's just, how do you deal with it? Well, some people do things that produce adrenaline on purpose. They like that feeling of bungee jumping and having their heart pounding or fast car racing. But that's still within their control. They're the ones choosing to bungee jump. Someone who has a surge of adrenaline before they speak to an audience, that is not their choice. It's mother nature's choice. Right. And we're gonna go into this a little more deeply here when we come back. Right now, not our choice. We have to take a short break here. I'm Ethan Allen, host of Likeable Science. Pam Chambers is with me today here on Think Tech Hawaii. We'll be right back. It's from the foundation for a better life. And we're back here on Likeable Science, here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Ethan Allen, your host. With me today in the Think Tech studios is Pam Chambers, author, public speaker, extraordinaire, consultant, teacher. And we were gonna move into a, we've been talking before that break a little bit about some of the reactions that we've had in the past. We've been talking before the break a little bit about some of the reactions to public speaking, the nervousness, and how that's a, you were talking about the matter of choice and this being important to choose to be able to do it versus not. And I'm afraid I sort of cut you off. Oh, that's all right. So, okay, let's say that I know that in two minutes I will be standing up on that riser in front of 200 people. It's likely that some adrenaline will start to flow because mother nature senses that on some level I feel a threat. And there is a bit of a threat truly to stand there and be judged. So this adrenaline starts to flow so that I can fight or flee. And that was useful when I was a caveman or if I need to lift a car off a trapped cart in a vice cream, that's useful. But to have all that extra energy going through my body when all I'm going to do is stand and maybe move a little is not useful. So it makes our clothes shake because our body is shaking. It makes our cheek twitch because we're shaking. It makes our eyelid twitch. It makes our voice tremble. It makes our contact lenses dry out. It has all these bad effects because there's just too much energy searching in this space. So what I finally learned to do through no help of anyone else, I might add, was to keep one arm natural before I was to stand up and then to pull on the seat of my chair very hard, very isometrically, very firmly pull toward the ceiling to release some of that extra energy. And it was like letting too much air out of a tire and it worked. I consciously sent that extra energy out of my body. Very interesting, very interesting. Actually, I've been doing some physical therapy recently and that's one of the exercises that I was doing is to sort of do almost that exact same kind of thing to pull it and then it basically does, yeah. Releases tension. Right, but some people forget to do that. They say, oh yes Pam, that sounds so good but then they stand up and they realize I forgot to pull on my chair and you can't go back to your chair at that moment. So now the task would be to think of something that you could do isometrically as you stand there. And the best answer to that, excuse me, equipment would be to dig your toes into the ground as hard as you can and that's not likely to be visible to people. And it works the same way. I would just rather that people do it ahead of time as a checklist, getting them ready. Yeah, this whole getting ready for talks I think is really a good one again, thinking about not just sort of public speaking per se but interviews or presentations at work or whatever. Preparing that and going through, yes, a checklist as it were for one that will routinize it, right? That'll make it like, oh yes, this is my routine I go through and that itself will tend to help sort of calm you down and put you in for on track. Right, it's like buckle your seat belt, adjust the rear view mirror, check your, it's a checklist, just like any procedure has a checklist. And some people make the mistake of practicing in front of the mirror as part of their checklist and I don't think that works because you're not talking to a mirror, you're talking to people. And so you should be instead not rehearsing but just reviewing why am I speaking? What is my purpose? What is my call for action? Has anything changed since the time I agreed to do this to now? Have I had any new insights that I'd like to include? And to think of it as an evolving, not in cement type of activity. Right, you can tell some people give a talk and then they give the same talk and they give the same talk and when you're hearing it you realize like this person has given this talk 100 times before. Yes, this is memorized. And it feels stale. Exactly, exactly. And we can tell that. And again, that tends to break that audience engagement. Right, the audience becomes disengaged. Why are you, if we're doing this, why aren't we just watching a film that this person do this talk? Yeah, same thing when they read off their PowerPoint. I can read, why are you reading to me? Why is your back to me? And if you're going to do that, just give me the handouts and I'll read them at home in bed if I want to. I actually used to, I had a good technique for practicing talks though. We used to have two cockatoos. Oh. And they are very empathetic and pick up on moods very quickly and I learned that if I would give a talk to them and they would fluff up and put their little beaks down and I was like, I was doing a really terrible job because if they're going to go to sleep but if I was being dramatic and making good gestures and varying my voice enough they'd be up, their crests would be up, they'd be watching me, they'd be interacting. And then I knew I was doing a better job. That is amazing. Whether it's going to be a run on brood now at the brood store. I mean, I suspect you could probably do the same thing with your dog or cat too. Just measuring how well you're holding your attention is going to, to some extent, the same kinds of things that will engage a pet are likely to engage an audience. And even, you could even gauge your own energy. At the end of my practice session, am I exhausted? If you are, you're doing something wrong. This is supposed to be invigorating and stimulating. Exactly. It's supposed to be, an analogy would be letting the audience know that somehow they are helping you carry this load by getting them involved with questions, letting them be the alternator to your battery, letting them help carry this. Without giving the wheel to them, you offer them a passenger seat. Yeah, that's a very nice analogy. And again, it's building this relationship with the audience. And it's, we don't often think in terms of, I'm a speaker, here's 100 people, I'm having a relationship with them. That's not sort of common perception of what a talk is about, but it really is. I mean, that's fundamentally what's going on. You have to be relating to these people. They have to feel that tie, that emotional tug in some way, right? That was the only thing that made this possible for me to do. It was impossible for me, based on the old school, old model, way of standing behind the lectern and delivering oratory thing. I mean, I just could never do that. But when I learned, wait, maybe if I could get the audience to respond to me, maybe we would share this thing. And then the question can become, well, what if they share too much? What if they get too involved? Well, then you say, you know what, I love it that you're this curious. Let me take one more comment right now. And then, yeah, you can move on. You can control it. Right, yeah. It's a more sort of flexible dynamic control that you're asking the speaker to maintain. That's right, that's right. And it's kind of like an accordion that can stretch out or be condensed based on how much time you have left, how much material you put into your suitcase, what the promise was that you made to whoever invited you to be there. What the questions are, what the audience wants to know. I remember one series of four talks that were supposed to be the same. And it was to a fourth of the group, a fourth of the group of four in a hotel. And after the second one, the HR person came up to me and accused me in an irritated way of not giving the same talk the second time. And I said, well, it was still on customer service. She said, but you gave two examples yesterday that you didn't give today. And I felt like throttling her. I mean, it was so annoyed at the thought that any two talks could or should be identical. The people in the audience were different. Exactly. They deserve, they want different things, right? They ask different things, they cared about different things. And so I was flexible and I didn't veer off my subject. Right. My wife used to teach kaleidoscope classes. I was always impressed that, well, she would sort of cover the same basic material. She would do it in these very different ways and sort of telling different stories and showing different pieces of it at sort of different points. I kept wanting her to have a nice linear outline and you should be, you know, have all this structured out and she was, no, no, that'll get stale. If I would do it the same way every time, this way. You know, she would have a stack of notes in front of her but half the time she wouldn't refer to them or she referred to different parts of them. Yeah, very, very different. So did this hotel person then ease up after the third? Okay, after the third session, I turned to her and I said, have I forgotten anything? And she said, yes, she was still on that. And then session four, thank goodness she was gone. She wasn't there. But it taught me a valuable lesson and that is when I'm working with my clients, do not expect or demand of yourself that these be the same. And here's why. And I got to explain that. Right, I mean, if you have some piece of a presentation that really needs to be just so, I mean, go ahead and videotape it and show the videotape, right? Yeah, that's what I told her. I said, after she said, well, yesterday, I said, oh, well, the way around that problem is to video me one time and then show the video to everyone. Oh, well, we didn't want to do it that way. And I said, okay, bye, see you tomorrow. For a different presentation. Right. That's, yeah, again, that fits in with sort of life, right? Rarely do you run into exactly the same situation. You always have to be flexible, be prepared to present a little differently. And hope that you do, hope that you grow. Hope that today you're a bigger, richer person from who you were yesterday because of that interaction that you had. Exactly, in interactions, presentations large and small, right, you just learn that you keep getting better and better, and that's what the whole point of this is, right? Right, right. PM Chambers is available to teach classes, consult, do coaching, you can get in touch with her at pamchambers.com, right? And life is a presentation. Is there a new book, I guess a new addition to this book? New addition, yes. New addition, and you have a new book coming out. Great book, wonderful book. Thank you. And it's been a wonderful having you here, Pam. Thank you so much. Very informative. Thank you. Aloha.