You just delivered a perfect presentation. You’d memorized your elevator pitch, shared all your content with your audience, and you didn’t miss a beat. You left the room ready to get to work with this new client only to later find out they’d decided to work with someone else. You thought you did everything right, so what happened?

In this case, you were probably speaking to your audience instead of influencing them. Speakers focus internally. They’re content driven and so caught up in their own experience of delivering the perfect pitch that they might lose their audience during the process. Influencers focus externally. They’re outcome driven and focus more on the listener’s experience where they can adapt to audience engagement and reactions. Most of us learned how to speak to an audience, but it takes practice to influence our listeners. Influence is the key to getting results, so we’ll walk you through three powerful strategies you can use to level up your influence skills.

1. CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE

While speakers gauge things from their perspective, influencers focus on the listener’s overall experience. Changing your perspective helps you become more in tune with your audience and can even help take away some of the stress in high-stakes situations. Before you can influence your audience, you should know:

• What is important to them or what do they want?
• What do they need to hear to say yes or agree with you?
• What questions are they likely to have?
• Are they engaged?

Approaching content from your listener’s perspective helps you better engage them because the content is relevant to them. Another added benefit of changing perspectives is that shifting the focus from you to your audience can boost your confidence. When you focus outward on listeners, it takes the focus off you and allows you to be more present during your pitch. The biggest thing to remember when it comes to influencing your audience is that it’s not about you. It’s about your listeners.

2. PRACTICE EXTREME FOCUS

In high-stakes situations, focus isn’t enough. To make every minute count, you’ll need extreme focus. Extreme focus is the best way to get your message across to listeners with limited time, shorter attention spans, and less patience if they feel like they have to search for your point during your pitch. To practice extreme focus, you’ll need to:

• Start with your purpose
  How do you want your listeners to think, feel, and act when you’re done? Your purpose drives your content, so you’ll want to be specific about how you can help your listeners.
• Limit and prioritize your content
  Sharing too much content during a small window of opportunity makes it more likely you’ll run out of time, your points will get lost, and you’ll overwhelm your listeners into inaction. See it from your listener’s perspective and share the content you know they want to hear to get the yes.
• Structure your points
  You know your purpose and you’ve prioritized your content. Now, structure your content in a way that’s memorable to your audience. Think of structure as giving listeners hooks to hang your key points on. If you tell them, “Let’s look at 3 tools you can use to improve your focus,” they’ll know three things are coming and will listen for them.

The bottom line? You need a clear purpose, prioritized content, and structure to accomplish extreme focus and win that yes.

3. GET OFF THE ELEVATOR

You’ve changed your perspective and tailored your content to exactly what your listeners need to hear. Now, it’s time to get off the elevator and close the deal. Your elevator pitch is a powerful way to start, but your biggest ally in getting your listeners to say yes is to create an emotional connection.

Focused, logical content helps people rationalize and justify their decisions and actions, but making a positive, emotional connection drives people to action. When time is limited, there are four ways you can quickly make an emotional connection:

1. Engage through story
2. Demonstrate understanding
3. Express emotion
4. Share a laugh

Above all else, be genuine and authentic when you’re using any of the above ways to make an emotional connection. This isn’t about being someone you’re not, it’s about finding small ways to adapt these strategies and make them work for you.

When it comes to influencing people, you’ll see better results when you change your perspective, practice extreme focus, and get off the elevator to win your audience. These three strategies are universal but how you apply them in different situations can be nuanced. Since you’re reading this, it means you’re likely already a great speaker who wants to take their influence skills to the next level. By putting these strategies into practice at the right moments, you’ll start hearing “yes!” a lot more.

Are you looking to maximize your influence? We’d love to work with you. Contact us to schedule a free consultation with Dr. Heather Johnson and discuss the results you need to get and how we can help you get them.

If your response to an invite for a video meeting is an audible groan, you’re not alone. Video meetings are valuable tools that help us stay connected and improve communication in many situations. On the other hand, attending too many video meetings can deplete your energy.

Before the pandemic, I couldn’t go a week without hearing one of my clients complain about unproductive meetings. Now that meetings are virtual, I hear complaints almost daily. All of the old frustrations have followed us into the virtual world where new issues compound them.

Video calls are more physically and psychologically draining than in-person meetings. Our brains work harder because there is more to process on a video call. Whether it’s all of the video tiles, multiple screens, or multiple documents, there is a lot of information vying for our attention. If there are five people on the call, we don’t just pay attention to the five videos; we notice five backgrounds, including people or pets walking by. It’s a lot of stimulation. Even if you’re not consciously aware of it, your brain works overtime to filter out the noise and focus your attention.

We are similar to teenagers learning how to drive. They need to think about every little decision they make because experience hasn’t created the muscle memory that automates those decisions. As video chat novices, we have to think about unmuting, sharing our screen, annotating, and more. Each decision takes additional energy, and we soon feel drained.

Video calls also require more effort to read body language, which is a valuable part of communication. What used to come naturally in face-to-face interactions now takes deliberate effort because of poor lighting, poor framing, or a slow internet connection. We require more energy to process what we see as we wonder if someone is avoiding eye contact because they’re nervous or aren’t comfortable looking into the camera. These things add to the effort it takes to communicate, collaborate, and make decisions.

On top of all of that, we see ourselves on video throughout the meeting. Can you imagine sitting in a conference room with a mirror in front of you? It sounds absurd, yet that’s what we have in our virtual world. It makes people very self-conscious. The distraction of the videos wastes energy. In addition, watching ourselves speak can make us less authentic as focus turns to ourselves rather than our audience.

When you add all of this up, it might be more accurate to call it “Zoom Exhaustion”. Let’s take a look at 7 ways to manage your energy and use it to increase your productivity.

1. Take Microbreaks –
   Even a 5-minute break can be beneficial. Get away from the computer and phone and move or meditate. Schedule microbreaks throughout the day to ensure that you remember to take them. They will give you a burst of energy.

2. Turn off video –
   Not every meeting requires video. If reading others is essential, then turn videos on, but don’t default to using videos for every meeting. Every time you’re able to turn the videos off, you’ll save energy.

3. Cancel the meeting –
   As with any other meeting, ask yourself if the meeting is necessary or if you could accomplish your purpose with an email or a brief phone call. If you’re not facilitating, be sure your attendance is needed. If you’re not sure, ask. It may be that a copy of the meeting notes is sufficient. Every meeting you don’t need to attend will save energy.

4. Hide your video from yourself –
   If seeing yourself on video distracts you or makes you self-conscious, hide it. To do this in Zoom, click on the menu on the top right of your video and select “hide self-view”. You won’t see your video, but others will.

5. Get a standing desk –
   Volumes of research show the harmful effects of sitting all day. Standing up for part of the day will give you more energy than sitting down meeting after meeting.

6. Change your view –
   It is nice to start a meeting in gallery view to see who is on the call and greet people. Looking at all of those videos for an entire meeting is more work for your brain than just looking at one. Changing the view to speaker view gives your brain a break from the stimulation of multiple videos. It also takes less energy to read facial expressions when the speaker’s video is big.

7. Resist the temptation to multi-task –
   It’s tempting to have email or other work open during a meeting. While I don’t recommend multi-tasking in any meeting, I discourage it here because it contributes to Zoom Fatigue by giving your brain one more thing to focus on when it’s already overtaxed. Save some energy by resisting the temptation to multi-task.

Zoom Fatigue is real and takes a psychical and psychological toll. You don’t have to sit passively by while Zoom calls drain your energy. These seven suggestions to increase your energy are a great start, but this is only the beginning. What else are you doing to fight Zoom Fatigue?

—————

—————

Dr. Heather Johnson is an internationally recognized speaker with extensive experience developing leaders.  With a doctorate in Psychology and over 20 years of business experience, she works with leaders to quickly identify individual and team performance obstacles and develops customized solutions that lead to rapid change and lasting results. Heather facilitates public and in-house workshops that deliver personalized, practical, and immediate results.  Some of her most requested topics are: Influence, Emotional Intelligence, Team Building, Communication, and Strategic Planning. For more information call contact us here or call 651-210-6021.

We all face highly emotional situations from time to time personally and professionally. Your approach impacts the communication throughout the situation, the relationships of the people involved, and long-term outcomes. Do you see yourself in either approach in the situation between these two neighbors?

The situation

Shortly after Trent moved into his dream home, he went next door to meet his new neighbor, Jack, who was also new to the neighborhood. During a friendly conversation, Jack explained to Trent that the construction materials in the yard were for a 2-story garage he planned to build with living space above it. As Trent listened to Jack’s plan, he became increasingly concerned that this new garage not only encroached on his border, but that it would negatively impact his view and the value of his house.

Trent went home that night and began looking into the ordinances to see if Jack was actually in violation, and if he was, what could be done. To save time, he called Steve, a close friend and neighbor who has had previous boundary disputes of his own. Steve was sure that Jack’s plans would violate the law and Jack would need to amend the plans for his garage. Trent planned to go back over and talk to Jack the following evening.

The escalation

In the meantime, Steve continued to ponder the situation and became more and more angry as he thought of the impact Jack’s garage would have not only on Trent’s property, but on the whole neighborhood. Steve hadn’t met Jack yet, but he pegged him as a selfish outsider who wasn’t going to follow the rules no matter what. Steve went to Jack’s house and began walking around the garage foundation and taking measurements. Jack came outside demanding to know what Steve was doing on his property and things escalated from there. Voices were raised, profanity was flying, and lawsuits were threatened. Two other neighbors heard the exchange and were drawn in as well. It ended with a call to the sheriff and everyone going back to their respective houses.

The response

Trent was disappointed when he heard that things had taken such an adversarial turn before he could talk with Jack personally. As Trent considered how to approach Jack, he thought about what he wanted to accomplish. Trent wanted to find a way that Jack could build his garage without negatively impacting Trent’s view or property value. He also wanted to preserve the relationship because he will live next door to Jack for the foreseeable future and their kids will likely play together.

When Trent saw Jack in his yard, he grabbed a bottle of bourbon, took a deep breath, and went to talk. As he approached, he said, “So, I hear you met Steve.” That broke the tension and Trent asked Jack if he’d like to talk about this over a drink. Trent spent most of the 90 minutes that followed listening. Jack shared details of his plans as well as his understanding of the ordinances. Trent began to realize that he wasn’t as “right” as he thought he was (and Steve was certain he was) and his perspective began to change. There was more to Jack’s plans than the garage, and Trent realized that this might actually increase, not decrease, the value of his property. He still had some concerns about the impact on his view that he shared with Jack. They made a lot of progress during their conversation, and agreed to keep talking.

The impact

While they didn’t resolve everything at once, two important things happened. First, Trent’s willingness to listen quickly diffused Jack’s anger over feeling attacked by Steve and calmed his natural reflex to attack when he feels threatened. Had Jack chosen a confrontational response, there would very likely be an ongoing battle long after the issue of the garage was behind them.

Second, Trent began laying a solid foundation for a good relationship for years to come that won’t involve attorneys. Trent demonstrated open, respectful communication and a desire to find a mutually beneficial solution. This enabled Jack to move from defending himself to a willingness to compromise. This foundation will pave the way to future conversations when there are disagreements.

Are you looking to improve your influence and communication skills this year? We’re here to help. Check out our growing list of online courses by clicking the button below!

—————

Dr. Heather Johnson is a nationally recognized speaker with extensive experience developing leaders.  With a doctorate in Psychology and over 20 years of business experience, she works with leaders to quickly identify individual and team performance obstacles and develops customized solutions that lead to rapid change and lasting results. Heather facilitates public and in-house workshops that deliver personalized, practical, and immediate results.  Some of her most requested topics are: Influence, Emotional Intelligence, Team Building, Communication, and Strategic Planning. For more information call contact us here or call 651-322-7821.