Winning Your Audience

CHAPTER ONE

Words Power the World

Launching a Competitive Message in a Crowded Marketplace

Imagine, for a moment, a round-the-clock cacophony of sound emanating from the packed streets of Manhattan, America’s largest and most densely populated urban territory. It used to be that a city like New York slept at night. There was a cooling off and quieting down after midnight. Maybe people were sleeping, talking on their phones, relaxing, reading a book, finishing homework, having quiet conversations, or watching television. Whatever they were doing, there was more listening and a somewhat slower pace at night. It doesn’t happen as much anymore.

There used to be neighborhoods where you could escape the noise. Now there is a permanent restlessness on almost every city block. Too many people in too few spaces, and it feels like they are all in motion—physically and mentally. Walking, biking, on scooters or skateboards. In one sense, the tension that arises from this physical proximity to the action is stimulating and, in another sense, it’s stressful. Everywhere on the streets are sounds, almost like a muted Bruno Mars concert or the rappers Eminem or Tory Lanez all in the shadows and audible but mostly indiscernible and unrepeatable. Individual words might not be detected but the constant distant roar, the horns, and footsteps become the rhythm, cadence, and the beat of the symphony of a crowded city. Indeed, it’s a lot like language!

Now, instead of people and their proximity in a city like New York, imagine the crowded world of words and their collision with one another in some type of frenzied, incoherent transmission. So many words are spoken and broadcast on expanding and multiplying platforms today that we risk being drowned in the traffic while possibly missing the meaning altogether. To compete in this crowded word-metropolis by delivering or broadcasting a speech or making a sales pitch is increasingly challenging.

While speech-giving has never been easy for most people, finding a pathway to make your voice heard in such a competitive environment in person, or over so many web-based platforms, has become an even greater challenge. Imagine the thousands of speeches, talks, messages being delivered every single hour of every day around the globe. Persuasion and storytelling—and the words that make this happen—power the world. Schools, universities, community centers, hotel conference rooms, stadiums, concert halls, government and political forums, web-based platforms—all are alight with words in front of both live and remote audiences.

In the realm of verbal communication, it is estimated that women speak an average of 20,000 words a day and men 7,000. Between them there is a lot of talking, recording, performance, meetings, writing, speeches, broadcasting, all pushed out in vast quantities unimagined only a few years ago. Will we ever reach a saturation point at which time audiences stop considering certain issues because the marketplace in words has flooded the imagination? In fact even the security and safety of words have been compromised to affect acts of aggression and manipulation. Will this make us reticent to send more words out into an insecure environment, uncertain about how they might be franchised and manipulated?

Observers also sound alarms about the possibly excessive amount of information pouring out in front of audiences in relation to what they feel are requisite pauses required for deeper analysis, meditation, and contemplation, especially of profound or complex technical, educational, or even artistic material. It is difficult to know what would arrest this ultra-advancing trend, when more and more content is available, delivery more urgent and competitive, and the symphony of word-sounds is more difficult to penetrate. This makes a marketplace for any public speaker, business or government, and their content, more dense and challenging.

It is tough, for sure, to be an effective messenger and have your voice heard in such a complex market and at a time when audiences are becoming less apt to listen to a live presentation. It is more convenient to explore information pulsed on social media and available at all hours and in all settings. Add this to an audience more accustomed to processing data than contemplating ideas, and it is a steep hill to climb. This is a very serious issue for culture and human progress in general. Rapid advancement in the use of artifical intelligence or AI will complicate the deployment and analysis of information and word messages sent through impersonal machine messengers.

It is this disruptive word-climate that gave rise, in part, to the Trump style of speaking, one that he honed at the real estate negotiating table and the Apprentice reality television show. It was unconventional by political and governmental standards, but was reflective of a high-stakes win-or-lose proposition at the business bargaining table. It reinforces the principle grounded in ancient Greek culture that all public speaking is selling and persuading.

Do Words Always Deliver Their Intended Meaning?

The widely accepted standard bearer of word definitions and derivations, the Oxford English Dictionary, contains 171,476 words and adds approximately 1,000 new words every year. On average, however, today an individual English language speaker uses only 3,000, or approximately two-tenths of 1 percent, of these words in writing or speaking. But words by themselves are one-dimensional and inert until they are spoken, written, exclaimed, or sung—and placed in a context along with other words. Thus joined, they become messages or missiles that can have impact, be educational, or even result in disruption or consolation. Words well chosen and paired with effective delivery can form a compelling compact resulting in meaning and enlightenment; anger and threats; entreaties, proposals, and deals; as well as explanation, instruction, and inspiration—just to mention a few intentions from words well placed in relation to the listening ear and discerning mind.

Words can be used, intentionally or unintentionally, to manipulate, control, and mislead an audience as well as to inform, inspire, or entertain. Words alone can change the outcome of a court case, land a person in jail, make a marriage proposal or lose one, establish a friendship or end it, raise or lower the equity value of a company, result in a job or be fired from one. Words and delivery can be hurtful or helpful, powerful or pitiful. But words must be heard and intellectually or emotionally processed to acquire meaning and import. When offered ineffectively, even words that flow from the heart, mind, and mouth of the speaker might not be received in a way that the words are meant to be heard. What remains from the transmission of words, in terms of value or impact, is how the hearer processes them. Without that delivery of meaning to the listener’s mind, why make the speech in the first place?

Alf Rehn, a popular writer and professor from Finland, has retold a poignant story in his article “The Art of Keynoting” about how what is said may not be what is heard. This is illustrated by what happened one day after he delivered a keynote speech.

This seems like a relatively harmless, yet possibly costly, lack of accurate message transmission; but the stakes, in political and especially multicultural, multilateral organizations and negotiations can be downright dangerous. More than that, these misunderstandings can appear in our conversations at work (as in this story) and at home and among families as an everyday occurrence.

As an example of what is spoken by one person that may not be heard in the same context by the listener, I have my own potent memory from a high-stakes encounter. It comes from my negotiations with Chinese officials on behalf of the US government. Every position we articulated and every request we made of our Chinese counterparts at the bargaining table in central Beijing was met with an emphatic “No!” This continued over many days and in lengthy and tedious meetings. We began to wonder if they even heard what we were asking for. We also wondered if their “no” actually meant “maybe” or even “yes.” We learned that in some Asian cultures people may not react well to requirements for face-to-face acceptance or denial in a negotiation. They may prefer to deliver their real answers in sealed letters or impersonal documents, quite literally “saving face.”

And that is precisely what we experienced in the Chinese capital.

Tired and tested by repeatedly long days of unsuccessful talks and a steady diet of exotic foods like monkey brains and sea slugs, we left the bargaining table in the State Guest House and climbed aboard an official US Air Force plane and flew back to Washington. Prepared to accept defeat from our efforts, we were pleasantly surprised to find our Chinese counterparts had acquiesced to all our demands—after we left! They delivered their acceptance in writing to the Secretariat of the National Security Council which announced the about-face as soon as our team was all assembled in the fabled Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing.

Pride had figured largely in their ancient communication protocol, and by our physically leaving the bargaining table, as we did, it gave them a safe way to accommodate us formally in writing—while maintaining their pride.

Westerners tend to be more direct, impatient, and demanding in their face-to-face negotiating styles. It is critical for any negotiator or speaker to learn these cultural distinctions in the way words are conveyed, understood, and, most critically, acted upon. You don’t have to be negotiating with a foreign power to risk creating a gap between what is said and what is heard. This may be like telling a child to stop speaking with a mouthful of food and they keep right on doing it! They might interpret your command as meaning to “someday” stop talking with a mouth full of food. Your perception of what a person with whom you are speaking is hearing—and what that person believes you are saying—will always be just that. Your only test of validity is if the other party takes action as a direct result of what you have asked of them.

Transferring information from one human mind to another requires the passage of words, either in writing or speaking. This transfer may be precise or imperfect, and the initiator may not ever know how the message is actually received. Teachers may be in a unique position to discover the degree to which their lecture content reaches their targeted goal by requiring students to take a quiz or write an essay afterward. This usually determines to what degree the message migrated from the teacher to the students. For politicians, pollsters typically measure the degree to which campaign or policy messaging reaches the voting population. Ultimately, the success of the messaging is measured at the ballot box. To be judged effective, the speaker’s message has to not only reach the ear of his listener but also his mind, his consciousness—and then, most importantly, affect his action at the ballot box.

After every Reagan speech, our pollsters were busy tallying the rise and fall of the president’s public confidence polling numbers. Did the speech do its job? Did his speech resonate and reach the targeted audience? In a White House like Reagan’s that revolved around communication, poll numbers were like fuel—to just about all of us, but with one big exception: President Reagan himself.

Reagan understood that in any polling, the critical question is who is doing the polling and who is doing the interpreting. Are they influenced by people with an interest in what people should think of what is said? Are polling answers affected by the ways questions are asked? Does whether or not the sun shines that day affect polling results? And what about the slice of the population that happens to be in the polling audience—is it properly representative? As scientific and sophisticated as polling has become, these potential variables may have been part of why Reagan paid little attention to polls, always questioning their reliability and susceptibility to manipulation and interpretation.