Nick Morgan: Trust Me

Nick Morgan is the founder of Public Words, and the author of 7 Steps to a Great Speech (ebook), Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, and Give Your Speech, Change the World: How To Move Your Audience to Action. Morgan is a top communication coach, and a former Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Morgan says that every communication is two conversations–the verbal and the nonverbal ones. We asked him how we can align those two conversations for persuasive communication.

Interview Summary: Four Steps to Communication Success

1. Openness – Learn to achieve a relaxed, comfortable state.
2. Connection – Combine content, body language, and delivery to capture and hold people’s attention.
3. Passion – Convey your underlying emotions about the subject at hand.
4. Listening – Listen to your audience members with all your senses and know where they are and where you want to take them.

Adapted from Trust Me, by Nick Morgan.

McLaughlin: What inspired you to write Trust Me?

Morgan: Well, a couple of factors came together to inspire the book. First, a lot of brain research in recent years has helped us better understand the relationship between the verbal, or content, side of communication and the nonverbal, which people call body language. It’s been very exciting to follow that research and to figure out what implications it has for public speaking and communication in general.

Second, people have a lot of resistance these days to the claims that businesses and governments make. So anybody in authority has a tough job selling messages to the public. I thought it was worth looking into how to communicate effectively in this skeptical era.

McLaughlin: You say that all communications are really two conversations. Could you explain that?

Morgan: Sure. Every communication is two simultaneous conversations—the verbal and the nonverbal. In terms of presence, emotional impact, believability, and creating connections between people, the nonverbal conversation is far more important to us than the verbal one.

For example, imagine a middle-aged man walking to the front of the room to speak. Slumping, he shuffles along very slowly. It seems to take an age for him to reach the front of the room. He looks up but he doesn’t make eye contact with anyone. He says in a thin, nasally voice, “I’m really happy to be here today.”

If you’re in that audience and you’re honest, you don’t believe those words. Before the speaker opened his mouth, the nonverbal conversation alerted you that something was wrong or off about this character. And the nonverbal conversation trumps the verbal one every time.

Of course, content is extremely important too, but the emotional underpinnings of human connections are conveyed nonverbally. People who want to be better speakers or communicators need to spend as much time and energy on the nonverbal as they do on the content part of their communications. That applies equally to a speech in front of a crowd, a meeting with your boss, or an interaction with your spouse.

It’s important to understand that the nonverbal conversation happens a split second before the content conversation. If that goes well, people in the audience will listen and be open to your content. But if the nonverbal conversation goes badly, there’s no possibility of any significant content exchange.

That’s why we see so many bad presentations. In the business world, but everywhere else too, day after day, the bar is set very low. On the whole, public speaking is very bad because, most of the time, people haven’t thought about the nonverbal conversation at the same level of complexity and intensity as they devote to their content.

McLaughlin: But if speakers are sincerely behind their messages and want to get them across, how do the verbal and nonverbal conversations get misaligned?

Morgan: Because of the innate behaviors we evolved to keep ourselves alive. Our bodies react faster than our minds to protect us from perceived danger. For instance, what do you do if somebody throws something at you unexpectedly? You duck to get out of the way—before you have a conscious thought about it. That’s because you’ve got these amazing neurons in your head that are monitoring three-dimensional space around you all the time.

So what happens when you walk up in front of an audience is that, before you can think about it consciously, your body signals danger—this whole crowd of people is out there and they may mean you no good. So your body prepares itself for the “fight or flight” response.

Your adrenaline level goes up, your heart rate increases, your palms get sweaty, and the blood leaves all except the crucial parts of your brain and body. Many people lose the ability to smile. But you can learn to fight that evolutionary conditioning. You say to yourself no, this is a great opportunity; I’m going to be open to this because I know what’s going on. Most people don’t do that work beforehand and that’s how the two conversations get misaligned.

McLaughlin: Some speech coaches say that becoming comfortable on stage is a matter of practicing the right gestures. Are you saying that is not the answer?

Morgan: That’s right. When I started in this business twenty years ago, I did the same thing: I rehearsed people on their gestures. It’s been a long process on my part to find a better way.

The problem with rehearsing gestures is that, in the brain, the neurons that generate gestures fire first, before those in the cerebral cortex. So in normal communications, your gesture begins a split second before you say the word connected with it. In the natural sequence, you form an intent deep in your brain and the gesture springs from that. And then you get conscious thought about it.

If you coach people on gestures, they think consciously about each gesture and it reverses the natural order. They think okay, now I’m supposed to do this gesture. So the cerebral cortex, the conscious part of the brain, directs that motion. But it happens too late.

So instead of getting intent, gesture, and conscious thought leading to word, you get conscious thought leading to word and then to gesture. And it looks funny. We’re all unconscious experts in reading body language, so we’re very quick to pick up what looks fake or strange in any way.

McLaughlin: Can you give us one or two tips for aligning our verbal and nonverbal messages?

Morgan: Yes. In our work with clients, we notice this over and over again: People are relaxed and natural in meetings to discuss goals and so forth. But when they stand up to give a speech, something comes over them. They may not be particularly terrified, but something goes dead and they get stilted.

So first, try to let go of the preconceived ideas you have in your head about what a speech should be. And realize that a good speech is a conversation. It didn’t used to be that way. A hundred or even fifty years ago, it was a different genre and people had different expectations of speakers.

But television has brought all the people that we look to as public figures into a conversational space with us. Public speaking has evolved and what we expect now from speakers is a conversation. We expect them to be relaxed and personable, and to chat with us.

The hard part, of course, is that it has to be a very focused and precise chat. It can’t be like a real conversation, which meanders, repeats, and fills in ambiguities with body language. It has to be better than that but it still has to feel like a conversation. Otherwise our inauthentic alarm bells go off.

The second thing you can do is work on getting control of your gestures, not with your conscious, but with your unconscious mind. How do you do that? You form the intent to be open. That is easy to say, but it’s not simple to do.

You have to put yourself in the imaginary space of talking to somebody you’re very comfortable with, maybe a good friend or a family member. Practice what that feels like and note how you behave—how you stand, and the gestures you make. And then, get yourself in that same mental space when you stand up to talk.

That takes work, but once you do it, you achieve a comfort level. And you’ll find that because you’re open, the audience will respond with openness. That creates a positive feedback loop and you’ll feel better and better as time goes on.

McLaughlin: Outside of the political arena, who do you think does a good job of aligning their verbal and nonverbal conversations?

Morgan: Well, a great place to study this is TED.com (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design), where you can listen to interesting world thinkers and leaders. You get the whole gamut of public speaking, from brilliant to wonderfully inept.

For example, Bill Gates was a recent speaker, and he was talking about what the Gates Foundation is doing to eradicate malaria and to improve education in the US. On the level of nonverbal communication, it was not a great speech because his body language is self-protective and becomes a barrier between him and the audience. On the other hand, he’s very smart and his content is clear. But the two conversations are not aligned, so it’s a great example of how that can go awry.

A good speaker you can watch on TED is Tony Robbins. I pick him deliberately because he is controversial. Some people think he is arrogant or have other criticisms of him. In his TED speech, he made a few odd gestures, but overall his nonverbal conversation and his content beautifully match one another. Nothing about his body language gets in the way. He believes passionately about what he’s doing and he gets that across.

As you listen to a speaker, sit back and ask yourself this question: Does this person mean what he or she is saying? Don’t try to think about that consciously; instead, let your nonverbal mind answer the question. Again, we’re all unconscious experts at that. It’s just when we try to make it conscious that it doesn’t work.

McLaughlin: If you could give a speaker one piece of advice on becoming more authentic, what would it be?

Morgan: I would say think about speaking to a group as a series of simultaneous conversations with each person in the room. You’re not talking to a crowd, but to 50, 500, or 3,000 individuals. And you’re just as capable of having one-on-one conversations with all those people as you are with just one.

McLaughlin: Thanks for your time.

You can find out more at www.publicwords.com.

You might also be interested in our print interview, Nick Morgan, Working the Room, and in our podcast, Nick Morgan: 7 Steps to a Great Speech.