How good is your Mongolian? Well, I don’t know even one word in Mongolian, but I learnt a powerful lesson about presenting and communicating, when grappling with this language recently. I am a Master Trainer for Dale Carnegie and most of my time is spent working here for Japanese clients. Occasionally, I am asked to work with Dale Carnegie colleagues from other parts of the world, usually in APAC, to help certify their new trainers. This is how I came to be working with ten budding trainers from Ulan Bator.
My instruction was given in English, but their own role plays and practice pieces, were done in Mongolian. I wondered at the start, how on earth can I coach these people, if I can’t understand their language? I was surprised though by a number of things. We communicate with words, but we also communicate with structure, energy, passion, voice pacing and body language.
Listening to their role plays, I could tell if they were not following the structure they were supposed to be using, even though I couldn’t understand one word of what they were saying. This just reinforced for me the importance of designing our presentations using a clear structure, such that one each section flows seamlessly into the next section. We will have a number of points and sub-points in our talks and we will have chapters in the talk as well, as we move from one subject to the next. We need to make sure the sub-points flow and are obviously relevant, regarding the main thesis we are making in our presentation.
We also need to make sure we have bridges to link the chapters together. If we just leap from one topic to the next, our audience may get lost and not make the connection. We know our subject intensively and extensively, so we have no problem juxtaposing the chapters together. However, someone hearing about content like this for the first time may struggle to follow the arc of the narrative we are explaining. The bridge doesn’t have to be extensive or complicated, but it needs to be designed from the start.
I enjoyed the Chinese classic, The History of The Three Kingdoms. At the end of each chapter, the author would say something like, “if you want to know what happened to Li Xue, then read the next chapter”. Such a primitive tool to link the story together, but it worked, because you were really wondering what was going to happen to Li Xue. We can do much better than that I am sure and we should. Let’s work on our bridging technique to link the talk together using all the component parts.
The energy levels of the different trainers were also a good indicator for me of the attractiveness of the content. I had no idea what the exact content was in Mongolian, but the degree of energy each speaker employed, transposed to me the amount of interest I should have in what they were saying. I noticed that if they were not injecting enough energy, I didn’t feel much resonance with them. Those who could operate at the higher energy levels kept my concentration, regardless of the 100% linguistic barrier separating us.
Training people and giving public talks, basically requires the same skill set in communication terms. Both need to be pumping out vast levels of energy throughout. Remember, the level of energy we employ for a chat over coffee is not what we need to be tapping into when we are on stage. Our role is now totally different and we have to move up some gears and adopt a much more powerful persona when we are on stage.
Vocal variety is so important. If we are too soft or too strong all the way through, as if the volume control was stuck on the one setting, then we will lose the attention of our audience. If the speaker is too low key in their delivery from start to finish, the audience quickly gets bored and they start daydreaming about something else or even more likely today, they are lunging for their phones to escape from us, to the lure of the internet.
If we are all relentless fire and brimstone, they get tired under the relentless bombardment from us. What I noticed from the class participants was the variation in their vocal delivery kept my attention, even though I was oblivious to the meaning of what they were saying. I thought, “Wow, if you can get this much impact in a foreign language, how much more potential is there when you are using your own native language when presenting”. The issue is often we forget about this and we get stuck in the one groove throughout our talk.
None of the things I have mentioned here are new, complicated or difficult, but like a lot of things we know but don’t do. Teaching the candidates from Mongolia was a good reminder for me of things I should be paying more attention to in my presentations. We all get into habits and lose some of the self-awareness we need to keep improving in our craft. Let’s not do that!