The Master Communicator's Handbook - Softcover

Teresa Erickson & Tim Ward

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1785351532 ISBN 13: 9781785351532

Publisher: Changemakers Books, 2015

Synopsis

This book is for people who want to change the world. Here’s the challenge: it’s impossible to change the world all by yourself. To have an impact, you need to communicate. In these pages, we share with you what we’ve learned over 30 years as professional communicators and advisors to leaders of global organizations. We seek to move each client from competence to excellence. As authors, our goal is to give you the tools you need to become the most effective and powerful communicator you can be. We want you to become a catalyst for transformation. We want you to discover that you have the potential to change the world.

About this title

About the Author

Teresa Erickson is president and co-owner of Intermedia Communications Training, Inc. For the past twenty years, Teresa has designed and led communications workshops around the world. Born in Portugal, Teresa worked with the Voice of America for 17 years as a producer, editor, and host of VOAs flagship public affairs program, broadcast worldwide to 90 million listeners a week. Tim Ward is the author of seven books, including the best-selling What the Buddha Never Taught and Savage Breast: One Mans Search for the Goddess. His travel stories have appeared in 13 anthologies, including Travelers Tales Best Travel Writing 2006, 2010, 2011 and 2012. Tim is also the publisher of Changemakers Books (an imprint of John Hunt Publishing). He also co-owns Intermedia Communications Training with Teresa Erickson, his wife and business partner. They live in Bethesda, Maryland.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Master Communicator's Handbook

By Teresa Erickson, Tim Ward

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2014 Teresa Erickson and Tim Ward
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78535-153-2

Contents

Introduction: Clarity, Leadership, Impact, 
Part I: Communicating Ideas, 
Chapter 1: Spreading Ideas: Memes and Messages, 
Chapter 2: Crafting Strong Messages, 
Chapter 3: Structure, 
Part II: Communicating with Authority, 
Chapter 4: Authoritative Body Language, 
Chapter 5: Enhancing Your Voice, 
Chapter 6: Choosing Powerful Words, 
Part III: Answering Questions, 
Chapter 7: Answering Questions Effectively, 
Chapter 8: Dealing with Difficult Questions, 
Part IV: Creating Connection, 
Chapter 9: Micro-messages, 
Chapter 10: Creating Rapport, 
Part V: Changing Minds, 
Chapter 11: The Visual Channel, 
Chapter 12: Framing, 
Chapter 13: Reframing, 
Part VI: Leadership Communications, 
Chapter 14: Cueing, 
Chapter 15: Vision, 
Chapter 16: Motivation: The DUH Triangle, 
Chapter 17: Transformational Storytelling, 
Chapter 18: Alignment: Expanding Your Influence, 
References, 
About the Authors, 

CHAPTER 1

Spreading Ideas: Memes and Messages

In our 30 years as professional communicators, one of the most fascinating and useful concepts we have come across is the meme. A meme is a special kind of idea. It's an idea that spreads. Strictly defined, a meme is a "unit of culture transmitted from mind to mind." Some compare a meme to a "mind virus," which spreads like an infection, the virus replicating itself inside each new host. In the same way, powerful ideas can replicate and spread.

The word meme was coined by philosopher of science Richard Dawkins. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene he mused about how ideas influence human evolution. Our genes pass on genetic information encoded chemically in our DNA molecules. Through survival of the fittest, the winning genes get passed on to the next generation, driving our physical evolution. Dawkins realized that ideas – memes – function in a similar manner. Our ideas pass on mental information ("units of culture") encoded electrically in our brains' neural networks. Through "survival of the fittest," the winning ideas get passed from mind to mind, driving our cultural evolution. Astonishingly, Dawkins had apparently discovered a second mechanism of human evolution. The difference between genes and memes is that innovative ideas spread much more quickly – at light speed compared to genetic evolution. Our genes could not possibly have evolved fast enough for humanity to make the jump from living in small nomadic bands to dwelling in thriving cities of many millions in just a few thousand years. In short, our memes have enabled us to dominate life on the planet.

Think of a meme as like the flame of a candle. Imagine a ceremony in a great hall in which each person holds an unlit candle. At the front, a match lights a single wick. That first flame gets passed back through the crowd, spreading from candle to candle, so that in just a few minutes, a thousand tiny flames illuminate the entire hall. That's how ideas spread.

What kinds of "unit of culture" are spread this way? It can be something as small and simple as an emoticon -:) – that ubiquitous little sideways smiley face that most of us started tagging on at the end of emails and texts. Or it can be a concept as profound as Climate Change, an idea that causes us to rethink the foundations of our global economy. The range of things that can be considered memes – units of culture that spread – is wide. It includes fashion fads, gossip, new technologies (such as smartphones and solar panels), scientific discoveries, political movements like the "Arab Spring." A song that gets stuck in your head is a meme. The music video of Gangnam Style has passed two billion hits on youtube.com as we write this chapter. Imagine if the message you want to communicate could reach such a huge global audience!

What's the difference between a meme and a message? A message is a political, commercial, social or moral idea that is being communicated. The root comes from the Latin missus, "to send." The emphasis is on the sender. You might be very inarticulate, but as long as you are expressing your idea, it can be considered a message. One might say, "He failed to communicate his message to anyone." With a meme, the emphasis is on the receiver. If there is no receiver, there is no meme.

Replicability is the mark of a meme, and this is crucial when it comes to effective communication. Usually when we communicate we think only about our immediate audience. Do they get the message? That's not enough. If your audience gets the message, but not well enough that they can articulate it clearly to others, the idea stops there. If you are seeking to create change – to build an organization, gather support for an issue, develop a new technology or enact any form of meaningful transformation – your ideas must spread from mind to mind to mind.

The evolutionary understanding of memes helps us better understand what really happens on a biological level when we communicate. The West's great thinkers – Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes – all shared a faulty belief that the mind was some ineffable entity that existed in a separate realm that somehow connected to a physical body. We communicated mind to mind with ideas that existed eternally in an "ideal realm."

Instead, envision the mind as being part and parcel of a physical brain, an interrelated system in which the thoughts of the mind correlate with the electrical patterns produced by the cells of that brain. If we see human communication as taking place from brain to brain, the process of communication starts to seem quite difficult. How does the electrical storm in my head jump across space and share a new meme with the electrical storm in your head? While this theoretical question is currently the subject of much interesting neuroscience and psychological research, in practical terms we can derive three insights into what it takes to communicate an idea from one brain to another:

1. Attention

First, get your listener's attention. Now this might sound obvious, yet most of the time when we speak, we are not thinking about whether our listener is really paying attention. Without attention, the neural networks in your listener's brain won't respond to your words. It's like speaking into the phone before the other person has picked up the call. Our first principle is: No attention, no retention.

2. Fit-ness

A new meme must fit into the current set of memes in a listener's brain. On a cellular level, an idea is a collection of nerve cells firing in a specific pattern. A new idea creates a new pattern. The new pattern has a better chance of integrating into the person's mind if it meshes well with the existing patterns. It's like clicking a jigsaw puzzle piece into place. The edges of the new piece have to mesh around the edges of existing pieces or it won't fit – and it won't stick. This means if you are going to convey a new idea, you have to know the existing mental landscape of your listener and put your idea in terms that they can most easily assimilate.

The simplest example of this is what happens when someone speaks to you in an unfamiliar language. It's just babble in your ear. But all too often when we try to communicate a new idea to someone, if we don't make it mesh smoothly with what the listener already knows, it's just babble for them, too. We do a lot of work with scientists and economists who often express their ideas using abstractions and mathematical probabilities that most people don't understand. Their audiences don't connect and they fail to communicate. For example, when we work on public communications with utilities regulators, they often like to dive in and discuss rate increases in terms of the need for capital expenditures and investors' rate of return – when they really should start by explaining how this change will affect a customer's electricity bill.

3. Memorability

Our brains are not built to remember; they are built to forget. We screen out most incoming information in order to avoid being overwhelmed. As a result, most of what we process in our conscious minds disappears a moment later. It's as if it goes automatically into a spam folder and gets deleted. Just a tiny percentage of what we experience each day gets integrated into our neural pathways and stored in long-term memory. If you want an idea to spread, you must first make it easy to remember.

Before we explore in detail how to use these insights to make your ideas into good memes, we first want to explain some pitfalls to avoid:

Buzzwords

Sometimes a new meme gets really popular, then just as quickly it becomes passé. In early 2014, the term for a smartphone "selfie" was all the rage. By late 2014, it was already uncool. Almost every organization has its buzzwords. Often these begin as genuinely transformational ideas. But as a word gets overused, it no longer evokes the great concept that lies behind it (see box). It's a kind of linguistic erosion: buzzwords become vague and amorphous terms that cease to evoke a strong mental image. "Every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain," as George Orwell famously put it in Politics and the English Language.

We think of buzzwords as ideas that are going stale. The trick is to freshen them up again to evoke the original concept in a vivid way. One easy way to do this is by finding the verb or noun at the heart of the buzzword. For example with the tired development buzzword "inclusive growth," one could use the original verb: "growth that includes women and young people."

Overselling

When someone comes on too strong with a new idea, they run the risk of creating resistance in their target audience. It's how we feel when confronted by religious zealots, used-car salespersons and pick-up artists. We suspect an ulterior motive and put up a defensive shield to fend off whatever it is they are "selling." This might seem obvious, and yet we chronically try to shove our favorite ideas down other people's throats. When seeking to spread your ideas, remember to give others the mental space to evaluate and judge for themselves whether or not your new idea will mesh well with their own existing set of memes.

Not My Silo

We screen out ideas that don't immediately strike us as relevant. We have to. Most of the time we're working to meet deadlines. We don't have time to think and muse about new ideas unless they are directly relevant. Whole organizations function like this, divided into sealed- off compartments: silos with little day-to-day contact with other parts of the organization. So when you are sharing a new idea, think about it from their point of view, then explain how your idea connects to what your audience already cares about. Relevance is critical.

Memes Trump Truth

Just because an idea is true does not mean it will replace a false meme. Once a meme takes root in a person's mind, it is difficult to dig it out. People will defend their memes even as the evidence mounts that they are untrue: a flat earth, the Loch Ness Monster, racial supremacy ... the list goes on and on. Similarly, a new meme can quickly spread even if it is false. Urban legends, gossip and political smear campaigns are all examples of how well-crafted lies can quickly morph into common knowledge. Think of that most famous phrase from the O.J. Simpson murder trial: "If the glove don't fit, you must acquit." It forged an unforgettable connection in the jurors' minds between tainted evidence and the verdict. When the glove didn't fit, even though much evidence pointed to O.J., he was acquitted. The lesson for master communicators is to realize that the truth does not speak for itself. In a world of memes, the truth needs advocates who can speak for it in a clear and compelling manner.

In summary, replicability is the key insight from meme theory for communicators. Thinking about your ideas as memes will help you express them more powerfully and spread them more widely. In the next chapter we will explain practical communications techniques for turning your messages into good memes.

CHAPTER 2

Crafting Strong Messages

The Four Cs

Let's turn to the practical application of meme theory and how it can help you craft compelling messages that will stick and spread. A powerful message has a meme at the center of it, with supporting language that helps people better internalize the meme and want to pass it on. Great communicators throughout history have intuitively grasped how to do this. In fact, we can illustrate the Four Cs of crafting powerful messages with just one passage from a master orator: Britain's wartime prime minister Winston Churchill.

Here's a paragraph from Churchill's famous speech delivered on 4 June 1940. At this time, many countries had been defeated by Germany, and Britain had suffered major military losses. Indeed, by some accounts, only half the British people expected their country to continue the war. The rest were resigned to defeat. Churchill's speech rallied the nation:

... Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender ...

Even if you are reading these words for the first time, you can doubtless sense the power in them. The speech was turned into placards and posted in homes and offices throughout the nation. Now let's examine how this one paragraph encapsulates our four key characteristics of a good meme:

1. Concise

Get to the core of your message using simple, easy-to-grasp words and short sentences.

Churchill's message of resolve was conveyed perfectly in the short phrases that make up the key sentence of the speech. Delivered aloud, each phrase would sound like a separate sentence:

We shall fight on the beaches,
We shall fight on the landing grounds,
We shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
We shall fight in the hills;
We shall never surrender ...

Although the speech as a whole has a reading comprehension level suitable for a university student, the core message has a reading level that a 10-year-old could easily understand.

One of our favorite examples of the effect of needlessly long sentences and words comes from the UK's Plain English Campaign:

Before: "High-quality learning environments are a necessary precondition for facilitation and enhancement of the ongoing learning process."

After: "Children need good schools if they are to learn properly." This is not to say that ideas must be oversimplified. "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler," as a quote attributed to Albert Einstein puts it. Simplicity eases comprehension, which makes for better memes. There's a neurological basis for why this is so. Our brains don't process written words by reading each letter or spoken syllable individually. We recognize words as whole units of meaning. It's similar to the way Chinese recognize whole written characters. We get the meaning of short, familiar words quickly. Extenuated anomalous verbiage necessitates additional assiduousness. You get the point: longer, less familiar words force our brains to shift gears, slow down and work harder to process the meaning of each combination of letters.

The same holds true with sentences. When we hear or read a sentence, we have to hold all the words in our head until the end in order to make meaning of the sentence. In fact, using MRI imaging, neurologists just recently discovered a distinct and localized region in the brain that lights up when we make sense of a sentence. Short sentences make this easy on our brains. Longer sentences, especially those containing additional clauses (or parenthetical remarks) or insertions of ideas that seem only loosely related – for example if we were to throw in a cooking metaphor about too many ingredients spoiling the stew or something like that – tax the mind, diminish comprehension and make it all too easy for the reader to check out before the sentence winds to its eventual close, a close that becomes downright aggravating should redundancies or secondary ideas be introduced near the end. So don't do that.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Master Communicator's Handbook by Teresa Erickson, Tim Ward. Copyright © 2014 Teresa Erickson and Tim Ward. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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Edition details

• Publisher: Changemakers Books
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1785351532
• ISBN 13: 9781785351532
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 184