Level Up!

Speaking Skills: What is the most efficient way to get better speaking and presenting skills?

There's a really useful exercise I've used to help people which I think of as expanding and contracting.

When I'm working with a student, the student will first go through the presentation. Then, informally, I'll have the student summarize what he just told me. Then, what are the three main points? The one main point? We'll chat about why he thinks those are the points are so important. This is the original full blown presentationcontracting into a few summary points.

After contracting, I'll have him expand and go through the presentation again, unscripted, but to really focus on hitting his main point. There's typically a lot of extra stuff in presentations that kinda feel like it'd be nice to say, but actually muddy the message.

At this point, I usually start asking lots of questions. What if I'm an audience member, and I see things this other way? That point you made earlier, what led you to believe that's true? What if I agree that your proposal is good, but I'm thinking of all these practical considerations - cost, time, personnel - what would you say to that? This helps the student expand at some crucial points and think things through. Now, it's always impossible to address every single possible objection, so of course after thinking through all of this extra stuff we'd need to contract once more.

One of the really nice things about the process of expanding and contracting is that it helps the student develop a really strong working knowledge of the subject. In the presentation, he can talk through various aspects of the subject conversationally because he's already talked it through.

Now, does this always work? I was once doing this with a bunch of interns, and I could see a lot of them getting more polished and talking about their topics more competently, but there were definitely still a few that just had a lot of nerves. I came across a little strong as a judge who would pick apart what they were saying after they were done, and for most of them their nerves weren't getting any better.

So, I decided to have a little bit of fun, and so we rehearsed again unpolished and without any of the nuance I kept coaching them to adopt. They just said whatever they wanted to say, I yelled at them from the back of the room (AMEN! PREACH IT BROTHER! THAT IS A FANTASTIC POINT!), and we just had a really good time. After making things fun, one of our interns who was the most nervous became one of the most confident.

When the interns gave their final presentations, they were amazing, and that was a great moment for me as their presentation coach.

In five minutes, could you explain something to me that is complicated but you know well?

I would explain how to explain something complicated.

Imagine I sat you down and asked you to complete a jigsaw puzzle. How would you do it? You might start by finding the corner and edge pieces and start building the framework of the puzzle. Or, you could start with some easily identifiable sections and go from there - for example, all the blue pieces might make up the only lake in the picture.

Suppose, though, that you didn't have all the pieces in front of you, but I instead fed you each piece one by one in random order. It'd be extraordinarily difficult to put the puzzle together! You'd need to hold on to each piece, and hope that you can connect your new piece to one the older pieces you've stashed.

This is the way that most teaching is done, and it's wrong. When the teacher already understands the big picture it's easy to feed the learner each piece of the puzzle as is convenient, but it's extremely difficult for the learner to then hold on to each new tidbit of knowledge as he tries to put it all together.

You need to start by building a framework to use as a frame of reference, or start with something familiar to the learner to use as an anchor point from which to build from. If you can do both by building a framework using something which is familiar (as I've attempted to do here), extra kudos to you.

Process Improvement: What are the skills to master in order to implement better innovative solutions?

Very broadly, the skills to:
1. Understand
2. Imagine
3. Execute

1. Understand
First, you need to understand the process or problem that you're trying to solve. It can be very tempting to jump towards a solution that you have in mind, but it's really important to understand the terrain before charging forward. That there is a problem may be obvious, but understanding what the problem is may be harder.

Is a deep understanding of the problem really necessary, you might ask? For example, you might have a friend who is showing many signs of sickness. You might not know exactly what's wrong with him, but there's plenty of things you can still do for him that can help him can get better. Chicken noodle soup, dress warm, get plenty of sleep, drink lots of water.

That's a good point, there definitely are things that are good to do even if we might not personally understand why they're good, but the better you understand what's happening the better you can implement a solution that fits. My wife once had rashes, and the doctor didn't know what it was so he prescribed her a few different medicines to apply. We diligently applied those medicines, things got worse, so she went to a dermatologist. Turns out that because of what she had, the medicine the first doctor had given actually made things worse.

2. Imagine
As you begin to understand all the different moving pieces of the puzzle and all the various factors involved, then you can start imagining how they could be put back together differently. Depending on the solution you're trying to solve, this creative element could take on various forms, such as mindmapping or drawing a visual map of the process you're trying to improve.

3. Execute
Implement the solution! Get it done. If we're talking about an inefficient process that needs a program to automate tasks, this means coding. If we're talking about a lack of teamwork that needs be addressed through better communication, this means setting up that framework for your team.

I really like this simple framework because it's applicable to so many different problem types. I also really like it because it helps people see that while it'd be great if they could do all stages on their own, that's doesn't have to be the case. You can bring together people who understand, the people who can problem-solve solutions, and the people who can execute your solution. Together, the innovative solution can be conceived and implemented.

Hello, World!

First post!

Today marks the first day of the Level Up! journey. The purpose of Level Up! is to share lessons and insights to help people Level Up! in life.

We've only just begun, I'm looking forward to what the future has in store!

Thursday, November 12, 2015

Hello, World!