Cool Down (20 page)

Once you have a handle on what you look like, it's also worth a moment to find out what you sound like. It's hard to accurately tell, given that when you hear your own voice, it gets distorted by your own cranium. To hear what others hear, you have to listen from the outside. Similar to the video example above, you can best achieve this with both a tape recorder and a mirror. The tape recorder, obviously, will give you a playback as to the tone, pitch, and speed of your speech. This helps you get a sense of how others hear you.

The mirror is a very revealing method of observing
how
you speak, since it allows you to see how your entire face as well as your hands and torso move as you speak. This is a surefire method of improving the timbre and the variety of your verbal communication, since anyone who observes himself speak will immediately and unconsciously seek to “brighten” his facial expression, which inevitably warms the tone of the voice. A warmer vocal tone delivers greater emotional connection with the other person and therefore adds greater depth and value to short telephone conversations, and long term relationships alike. It's one of the simplest and most useful pieces of advice I give to anyone who has to spend time on the telephone: Have a mirror nearby so you can see yourself speak. You cannot do much to change the physical structure of your vocal chords, of course, but there is a lot you can do to make them as influential as possible. Most of it has to do with slowing down.

If you find you speak fast, slow down. Not only does this make you easier to understand, it, too, lowers vocal tonality, both for men and women, which gives greater authority, presence, and influence. If you speak with an accent, do the same thing: Slow down. Accents add great variety to life and, in my opinion, should never be eliminated or suppressed. A far better and more impressive approach is to maintain an accent, but ensure it remains clear through slower, more considered speech.

People who make it their business to influence others constantly put this knowledge into practice. Great leaders think deeply and talk slowly. This allows them to take more time to convey a message, which, in a time-obsessed society, gives greater weight to the message itself. As with one's choice of image and dress, the choice of vocal pace also sets the tone of relationships. Fast talkers are perceived as nervous or perhaps slick. Agonizingly slow talkers can make people almost explode with frustration. But somewhere in between is the magic point where three powerful things happen.

If such suggestions sound silly or excessive, listen to the recorded speeches, or sound bites, even, of truly great orators like Winston Churchill or Nelson Mandela. You will notice that a great deal of effort is expended in leveraging all natural oratorical gifts. They match the words they want to say with the rhythm that will best carry it, so that the message is most effectively delivered and the desired responses or actions are attained. Rhythm is an emotion-focused reaction, one of our most basic and ancient attributes, and it resides deep in the core of human perception. It sits there waiting to leveraged fully by those who know its power.

One of the best circumstances where this can be put into practice, and one of the least considered, is answering a phone. Once again, the reactionary nature of answering a phone call causes people to forget that an opportunity for influence exists. Let the phone ring one extra time. Pause briefly to clear your throat, and take a moment to center and deepen your voice by saying a few words slowly and quietly to yourself—almost like a quick prayer—before answering. Yes, it sounds strange and goes against our reactionary nature, but this, too, helps loosen the vocal chords and lower the vocal tone. Nobody questions opera singers when they sing their own warm-up parts. Why? Because it's an expected part of their role as a vocalist. It makes them credible as a performer. Well, you're a performer, too. A quiet, three-second warm-up is all you need to change your voice and your attitude from reactive to proactive, from ordinary to influential for the call you're about to take.

Although writing is secondary by far to face-to-face communication, it will always remain necessary. Consider the numerous forms of writing that people deal with daily, including memos, PowerPoint presentations, email, text messages, proposals, speeches, press releases, and many more. But many people tend to write in the same way they travel—event to event. In just the same way that traveling time and distance are seldom factored into a busy person's mental assessment of an upcoming day, the act of writing is, due to time pressure and the speed of the moment, reduced to a quick activity, a hasty spell-check, followed by a swift mouse click on either “Send” or “Print.”

Don't dismiss the concept of poor writing as just meaning bad spelling and grammar. These are merely symptoms. All writing is an exercise in influence, and poor writing is that which fails to influence the reader in the manner you desire. What sort of influence? It might involve your reader buying your product or buying into your idea or simply attending your meeting. Influence might simply refer to the fact that your message gets read and attended to before all the other ones in a reader's inbox. As it is with the concept of meetings, the objective of any written communication is to pull more productivity or profitability out of a given situation. There must be a positive balance on the ergonomic balance sheet for the task to be worthwhile. In other words, the time it takes to write and send a message is time you can't get back. Your message must yield response or reaction in the reader that exceeds the value of the time you have invested. Many people simply write to get a task off their desk and out of their hair. That's the quick, but less effective way. It is quite easy to make your writing more effective, however. It doesn't require a degree in English literature, but it is best achieved by allowing enough time for planning beforehand and proofing afterwards.

Planning a written document, from a large presentation to the simplest email should not be an overly long exercise. It need take just a couple of minutes. What's important, however, is to ensure those minutes are given over to it, which can be quite a challenge in the high-speed world of event-to-event thinking. It should ensure that the true end result—the objective of the message—is known and is properly communicated. What is this “true end result”? It's not the moment at which the message is written and completed. The true end result is defined by what the reader does once having received and read it. All of your documents can be influential once you can answer these questions during your planning phase:

This may all sound very officious and obsessive for email, but the true end result speaks for itself: When your communication style stands head and shoulders above the style of everyone around you, people will gravitate towards it, and you will receive satisfaction more quickly. Your subject lines will grab attention; your calls to action will yield action. Your messages have to compete with many other sources of information that your reader must face every hour, perhaps every minute. It's up to you to ensure yours stand out, get noticed, and elicit the right type of response. It's like fishing on a river bank that's crowded with other anglers. You can hope your line gets noticed, or you can take a little time to walk upstream for a couple of minutes and enjoy unfettered access. Which do you think would yield the best results?

Writing, just like personal appearance, needs proofing to be excellent. Event-to-event thinking allows people very little time to proof and correct their work, other than a rudimentary spell-check. Though most spell-checkers, and to some extent grammar checkers, catch the most obvious errors, they often overlook mistakes, and they are not able to refine the message's value. That's a human skill.

This poem, attributed to Guffey, Rhodes, and Rogin from their book
Business Communication: Process and Product
, highlights this fact simply and beautifully: It's fun to type this poem in your word processing program to observe how many errors the spell-checker detects:

The best kind of proofing involves the use of two sets of eyes to review the written material, as well as a little time to do it.