Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

THE AUTHOR

NICK MORGAN, founder of Public Words Inc., is one of America’s top communication and speech coaches. He is a former Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, affiliated with the Center for Public Leadership, and served as editor of the Harvard Management Communication Letter. He is the author of the acclaimed book Working the Room, reprinted in paperback as Give Your Speech, Change the World.

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In this book, acclaimed communications coach Nick Morgan shows how you can become an effective, charismatic speaker by communicating with authenticity and respect for your audience. Trust Me presents a four-step process (which Morgan perfected while teaching at Harvard) that enables you to find your own best personal communication style to maximize your persuasiveness and presence. This proven process works whether you’re speaking to a group or in a one-on-one conversation.

As Morgan explains, we are all unconscious experts in reading each other’s body language. When words and body language are in conflict, we believe the body language every time. This makes conscious efforts to change our unconscious behavior difficult. Even momentary lapses are perceptible to the audience. The key to success is to train your body language to unconsciously align with your message.

Trust Me outlines the four steps to communication success:

• OPENNESS
• CONNECTION
• PASSION
• LISTENING

In addition, the book offers an in-depth analysis of the research that underlies the four-step process and includes tips for controlling fear when communicating.

At a time when there is little tolerance for hype and spin, this book offers a practical, clear guide for becoming a persuasive and authentic communicator.

Aus dem Klappentext

Trust Me

"Every communication is two conversations: the verbal one?the content?and the nonverbal one?the body language. If the two are aligned, you can be a persuasive, authentic communicator. You may even come across as charismatic. If the two are not aligned, people believe the nonverbal communication every time."?From the Introduction

In this book, acclaimed communications coach Nick Morgan shows how you can become an effective, charismatic speaker by communicating with authenticity and respect for your audience. Trust Me presents a four-step process (which Morgan perfected while teaching at Harvard) that enables you to find your own best personal communication style to maximize your persuasiveness and presence. This proven process works whether you're speaking to a group or in a one-on-one conversation.

As Morgan explains, we are all unconscious experts in reading each other's body language. When words and body language are in conflict, we believe the body language every time. This makes conscious efforts to change our unconscious behavior difficult. Even momentary lapses are perceptible to the audience. The key to success is to train your body language to unconsciously align with your message.

Trust Me outlines the four steps to communication success:

• Openness

• Connection

• Passion

• Listening

In addition, the book offers an in-depth analysis of the research that underlies the four-step process and includes tips for controlling fear when communicating.

At a time when there is little tolerance for hype and spin, this book offers a practical, clear guide for becoming a persuasive and authentic communicator.

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Trust Me

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Somewhere between the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, the general public became tired of hype and decided that it wanted authenticity instead. It's the most important quality in leadership communications today. With it, you can move people to action. Without it, you can't even get a hearing.

And then there's charisma-the X factor every leader wants, even if some won't admit it. These are the ones who often say something like, "I'd rather just be me. That's more authentic." What they really mean by that is, I don't want to do the hard work of practice. I'll just wing it.

Are the two qualities really opposed? It is at the heart of this book to argue that you can have it both ways. In fact, in this era of nonstop communications and demands for authenticity from leaders, you have to be both charismatic and authentic to lead successfully for any length of time. And you have to practice hard to achieve apparently spontaneous authenticity and charisma. This book will show you how.

I'm assuming that you're a leader, or a leader in training, who wants to make sure that your communications-whether to one or many, formal or informal, prepared or off the cuff-are as persuasive, powerful, effective, authentic, and charismatic as possible. To reach that happy state, you have to be prepared to work on controlling your communications so that they are instrumental for your career and not merely subject to happenstance.

We'll begin with a little work on how people actually communicate, to clear away some common misunderstandings that get in the way of both charisma and authenticity.

EVERY COMMUNICATION IS TWO CONVERSATIONS

The first conversation in every communication is the one you're aware of: the content. The second conversation is the one that you're an unconscious expert on: the nonverbal one. These two always go together. In fact, they are so integral to one another that most people tend to gesture with their hands and change facial expression even when they're talking on the phone. No one else can see them, yet they keep gesturing on regardless. It's not just habit. There's a profound reason that people gesture when they attempt to communicate even when they can't be seen.

We tend to think that the second conversation is merely an accompaniment to the first. As we talk, we might wave our hands in the air, perhaps as a poor substitute or stand-in for content. We believe, if we ever think about it, that the gestures are just follow-ons: something to do with our hands; something that clarifies the meaning, or emphasizes something being said, or helps keep the other person listening; something that follows the words-maybe a physical flourish to enliven our sometimes less-than-thrilling content.

This way of thinking is profoundly wrong, and a chief aim of this book is to change it. All kinds of insights about how to communicate flow from getting it right.

GESTURE CAN CONVEY MEANING INDEPENDENT OF WORDS

Some people, on reflection, may admit that they sometimes gesture when they can't think of the words, or at least the right words, to say. Oddly enough, that's often sufficient for the other person to get the meaning intended. But rather than giving credit to the gesture for conveying the meaning, we usually give the other person credit for reading our minds, to our relief.

Try the following experiment in this context. Sit in a public place-perhaps a restaurant where the tables are close together and the conversation is lively. Sit with your back to a pair of people who are having an animated conversation. Listen hard, and try to capture as much of the meaning as you can. You will be surprised at how hard it is to follow the conversation. You will hear broken phrases, agreement to something you haven't caught, simultaneous talking, abrupt changes of topic you weren't expecting (but for some reason the speakers were), and apparently incoherent exchanges of information. If one person in the duo is dominating the conversation, perhaps telling elaborate stories, you may get more of it than you otherwise would. But if it's an average, reasonably equal exchange, you will be astonished at how fragmentary and elusive the communication is.

Why is that? The reason is that the "second conversation" is really the first. For certain kinds of communications, indeed most of the ones we really care about, we communicate first with the gesture and second with the word. This concept is central to this book.

There is a host of interesting implications from this insight, but for now, I'll say just that it means that when people communicate topics of great importance to them, they gesture what they mean a split second before the word comes out.

In fact, one way of looking at the brain contrasts our cerebral cortex with our limbic brain and suggests that certain kinds of gesture originate in the limbic a split second before the cortex fires away with its conscious thoughts. In other words, rather than thinking, I'm hungry, so I'll pick up the bowl of soup now, our brains direct the soup to be picked up unconsciously, and then form a conscious explanation of what we're doing (I just picked up that cup because I'm hungry).

Why should we care about that? Because it turns the commonsense way we think about word and gesture upside down, and because those interesting implications flow from that inversion of common sense.

Gesture comes first. You can confirm this for yourself if you go back to the restaurant, this time keeping your eyes firmly trained on those two people in conversation and listening closely. Focus especially on gestures that accompany the noun phrases. Let's say one person says, "How did you get there?" and the other responds, "I took an airplane." Watch the gesture associated with the word airplane. Depending on the information being conveyed, the gesture will start before the entire sentence or just before the word airplane itself. If there's strong attitude, such as something like, Of course, I took an airplane; it's three thousand miles away over water. How else would I get there, you idiot? then the gesture may convey all the emotional freight in the communiqu: the Of course it's three thousand miles away over water how else would I get there you idiot part. The person might shrug and turn her palms upward, while raising her eyebrows and looking hard at the interlocutor. She might shake her head and offer a half-smile. Those facial and hand gestures get across all the emotional meaning she wished to convey to her friend-maybe not in precisely those words, but close enough for both parties to get the message.

It's the nature of most of our communications that they unroll like this one. We use surprisingly few words and convey the emotional colors and tones of the conversation mostly through gesture.

When two people know each other well, gesture can take up a larger part of the communications between them. In this regard, it becomes a kind of shortcut that allows the two to alert one another to important shifts in the conversation or strong feelings or topics to avoid. When two lovers meet, for example (not the ones in movies who have just fallen in love, but those who have had an intimate...