A Kick in the Career: Meet Jerry Pudnik!

Sometimes – maybe quite often – it’s hard to take advice. Even really good advice can be hard to accept and act upon. People just don’t like to be told what to do, even if it’s the right thing to do. Go figure!

Sure, I can tell you all the valuable wisdom I’ve gleaned in my illustrious business career. But will you drop what you’re doing and start acting on that information immediately? No, that’s very unlikely, despite the fact that doing so might financially benefit you. In fact, it’s much more probable that you’ll be counting the seconds until I finally shut up. Why? Because you resist being told what to do, even when it’s in your best interests. Once again, that’s just human nature.

But I do want to help you. I do want to share what I’ve learned, and what I’m still learning. That’s why I’ve created a new character named Jerry Pudnik. 

By listening carefully to what Jerry Pudnik says, you will definitely become a more effective and persuasive communicator. When that happens, there’s a good chance your income will go up as well.

But here’s the best part. You don’t have to take Jerry Pudnik’s advice. You don’t have to do what he says. On the contrary, you shouldn’t do what he says. You should do the opposite of what he says, because Jerry Pudnik is always wrong. He’s a genius, but he’s a genius in reverse.

Isn’t that beautiful? Now, instead of having to learn from someone older and wiser than yourself, you can learn from someone dumber than yourself – and by doing the opposite of what he says, you can exercise your rebellious, anti-social tendencies at the same time. It’s a win/win.

Well, that’s enough preliminary. Let’s take Jerry Pudnik for a test drive. Let’s do some Q&A with Jerry Pudnik and find out just how wrong he can be.

Question: Jerry, suppose someone confides in you about a very emotional, personal problem they’re having, what’s the best way to respond? For instance, if someone tells you about a health issue that’s going on in their family, or perhaps even a death, what can you say to make them feel better?

Jerry Pudnik: That’s easy, Tom! When people tell me their problems – especially their emotional problems – what they really want to hear is how I had an even worse problem and how I dealt with it. For instance, not long ago a colleague of mine was feeling very sad because her dog passed on. I listened patiently, I heard her out – and then I told her about when my cat died. It’s was as simple as that. I also asked a few leading questions. I said, “How old was your dog?” When she told me that her dog was thirteen years old, I replied that my cat was fourteen! The main point is, instead of letting her go on about herself and her dog, I shifted the conversation so it became about me and my cat!

Brilliant, isn’t it? What’s more, you may be aware that many (if not most) people are already acting on this Pudnik Principle. Every day, millions of people play the game of “Topper,” as the late, great Zig Ziglar called it. They respond to someone’s difficulty by narrating a bigger difficulty of their own – and make no mistake, they’re deeply resented for it.

So be aware of the temptation to make every conversation about you. That’s the lesson to be learned today from Jerry Pudnik, the man who’s always wrong. There will be much more to come!

Check out this Zig Ziglar video on YouTube. Maybe a little old fashioned, but old fashioned fun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRMogDrHnMQ

Perfect Pitch: Four Steps for Facing Fear

The process of becoming an effective business communicator is never really complete. It’s a dynamic experience in which new thoughts and feelings are always appearing. Totally unexpected emotions can surface, including what I call a version of stage fright. It can happen even if you’re talking with only one other person!

Stage fright can begin very innocently. You may notice what looks like a bored expression on the face of a client or customer. You may wonder to yourself whether your energy level is where it needs to be. You may see the person stealing a glance and their watch, or checking a cellphone. Worst of all, it can all add up to an impression on your part that they have no interest in you at all, that your ideas are completely wrongheaded, and they can’t wait to get out of there. Your stage fright has turned into catastrophic thinking.

It all begins with a loss of focus. Some minor distraction occurs, and you become less and less able to concentrate. The result can be nervousness, memory lapse, sudden fear, and general discomfort. Fortunately, the whole syndrome can be avoided by keeping a few basic ideas in mind. No matter how new or how experienced you may be, run through this mental check list a few minutes before dealing with an important business communication. A few moments of prevention are worth many hours of cure.

Start by reminding yourself that you have prepared to the best of your ability. You have done your research on your product or service, as well as on your customer or client. You may wonder whether you could have done more, but this isn’t the time for second guessing. Instead, you are going to be instinctive and intuitive. Now you’re going to trust your diligent preparation to do its work for you. No more effort or worry is required. Everything you need is already here.

Next, make yourself a promise to relinquish judgment of your communication during the time it’s going on. Self-judgment during a presentation is self-destruction. It takes you out of the present and into the past or future, and destroys the natural flow of your meeting. So rather than judge yourself, simply observe yourself without any inner commentary, but with full positive motivation. When you are about to make a major point, for example, intend to do it and then know that you are doing it, that you’re translating intention into action.

Third, remind yourself not to let the perceived reaction of your client or customer derail your communication. Don’t let anything you see or hear cause you to second guess yourself. If you have done a sufficient amount of preparation, you may feel that you know how listeners will react to your message. But preparation is not a perfect solution. So keep your poise. Don’t overthink what’s taking place. For the period of time that you’re speaking, have the attitude that you need only to please yourself.

Finally and most importantly, enjoy the communication you’re engaged in. This is the time when you can finally share with your clients what you have worked so hard to achieve. This is an opportunity for satisfaction, not an occasion for being distracted by real or imagined errors. There will be time for that later. Right now, your real thoughts and emotions should take over. Don't allow minor details to obscure what’s really taking place. Let your excitement for the opportunity be completely present – because the only thing you have to fear really is fear itself. 

A Kick in the Career: "What's funny about me?"

Thank you for all the responses to my blog! Since I have a
background in comedy, I’m especially gratified by the comments
on my humor posting (“What’s so funny” April 9, 2015.) So let’s
explore that topic a little further, shall we, ladies and gentlemen?
Anybody here from Jersey?

The worst feeling in the world – maybe not the worst, but definitely a very bad feeling – is telling a joke and nobody gets it. You’re really helpless when that happens, and it’s best to simply accept the helplessness. If you try to “explain” the joke, you’ll just make everything worse.

You see, once a joke has failed, it’s failed permanently. You can’t explain a joke in order to make it funny. Jokes can be analyzed, both funny jokes and unfunny ones, but that’s a different process. It should happen later, after the joke has succeeded or failed.

I used to visit with Jerry Seinfeld when he was on tour. Once, after watching his act from backstage, I was able to speak with him about a joke he’d used.

He was talking about how life can suck in general, and then he said to the audience, "All our lives suck, but mine sucks a little bit less than yours.”

Is that funny? Well, he got a huge laugh. I told him I thought it was a risky joke because it referenced the advantages of fame and money that many in his audience probably didn’t share. Usually a comedian wants sympathy and identification. Condescension is anathema to creating the trust from the audience that the performer needs to have.

That’s the conventional wisdom -- and though it really is conventional, it also really is wisdom. But Seinfeld’s joke worked because he had a deeper understanding of why the joke would be funny. The humor lay not in the content of what he said, but in the fact that he was being socially inappropriate, and doing it blatantly.

Jerry understood the conventional expectations of the audience, and then he audaciously trumped those expectations. The audience rewarded him for not pulling his punches with false modesty, and laughed at his temerity in stating the truth.

Well, we can't all be Seinfeld, not even Jimmy Kimmel. The joke was a superb strategy for Jerry, but I was not wrong in pointing out its riskiness. Whether you’re doing standup or trying to sign an important new client, it’s best to throw the ball over the middle of the plate…unless you’re sure you can hit it out of the park.

Wait a minute, does that make sense? If you’re the pitcher, you can’t also be the batter. But I won’t try to explain it! Anybody here from Jersey?

Perfect Pitch: You talk too much! (or not enough)

                                              I could have talked all night
                                   I could have talked all night
                                  And still have talked some more.
                                  I could have spread my wings
                                 And said a thousand things
                                 I've never said before....
                                          (Apologies to Julie Andrews!)

In the old days people could really talk. Talking was considered an art form, and an academic discipline known as rhetoric. This pertained mostly to public speaking, but the principles are also relevant to one-on-one interactions.

Oral communication was understood to consist of four basic elements: invention, arrangement, style, and memory. 

Those categories are actually still very applicable today, and they’re intuitively understood by everybody who really communicates well. Today and in my next three posts we’ll look at these topics one by one.

What used to be called invention really means just having something interesting to say. You can’t be a great talker if you don’t have anything of value to talk about.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop a lot of people. Plenty of men and women can hold forth for a long time without any good reason to do so. This can happen at the board of directors meeting for a major corporation, it can happen on parents’ night at a nursery school, or (worst of all) it can happen on an airplane, where the window is the only way out. Usually compulsive talkers talk when they have nothing to say, but sometimes they have too much to say and they’re just trying to fit it all in.

There’s also another category of person who actually does have valuable information to share, but who’s afraid to say anything. That’s also a failure of what used to be called invention.

Right now, ask yourself where you stand on that spectrum. Are you someone who feels the need to talk for talking’s own sake? Or do you back away from communicating even when people would benefit from what you have to say?
         
Try to be ruthlessly honest about this. It’s not easy, because most people are amazingly unaware of their true nature as communicators. Plus, this is something that other people will usually be uncomfortable discussing with you.

Questions like, “Did I talk too much?” or “Was I too quiet?” or “Did I make a fool of myself?” may not get a frank answer. But if you train yourself to give focused attention to what you say, how you say it, and how people seem to be reacting, you can probably make a pretty accurate assessment on your own.

Your Inner CEO: Some words (about money!) you need to know

Often we use words without knowing what they really
mean….and that’s usually fine, because communication can
still take place without understanding the dictionary
definition of a word. But from a business perspective it can
be useful to explore what we’re actually talking about when
we start talking, especially for certain basic concepts.

Like money, for example…

Money is difficult to define even though it plays an important part in our lives every day. But here’s a definition of money that might be as good as any: money is any circulating, quantifiable, and symbolic medium of exchange. That definition includes three specific attributes of money, so let’s take a look at them one by one.

First, money is a circulating medium. It can be passed without much difficulty between individuals, or it can be shipped from one place to another. So a piece of land is not money. The value of a piece of land, as expressed by money, can circulate between people, but not the land itself.

Second, money is quantifiable. That’s what makes it possible to circulate. If pennies were the only denomination of money that we had, we’d have a hard time even paying for a package of gum, which now costs about a hundred and twenty-five pennies. Fortunately, different quantities of money can be expressed by bills or coins of the same size. A hundred dollar bill is no bigger than a one dollar bill. The quantity that one represents is a hundred times larger than the other, but the physical size of the bill is the same.

The last quality of money is the most interesting, and is really money's most basic characteristic. Money is symbolic. As a purely physical object, money has almost no value. It’s a scrap of paper or a piece of metal. But its symbolic value is literally infinite. Money can symbolize anything and everything, and it can symbolize all those things at once. A dollar bill can represent part of the cost of a hospital, or of an atomic bomb. It can be a gift from the Tooth Fairy, or it can be part of a drug deal. In the end, money is both tangible and mystical. It may be the most important of all humanity’s creations, and it’s certainly the most imaginative.

Riches is an easy word to define. Riches just means having a lot of money or having a lot of the things that money can buy. A rich person’s riches is easy to recognize and document. You can see it in a big house, an expensive car, or a lot of big numbers on a bank statement.

It’s usually fairly easy to tell if someone is rich. People tend to express their wealth in a public way. That doesn’t mean that all rich people are extravagant, but you don’t often find them sleeping on park benches. Also, people can go from poor to rich or rich to poor very quickly. You can win the lottery or lose your winning ticket. (You can also find it again.)

Wealth can include riches but wealth is also a larger concept. Wealth is a sense of abundance that riches can help to bring about, but it also transcends riches. When we speak of wealth-building, we mean not just acquiring a lot of money but also having the consciousness capacity to use the money wisely. Strange as it may seem, money is one of the building blocks but it’s not the foundation of true wealth.

That foundation includes many other things. It even includes developing your vocabulary. So when you have a spare moment, try looking up the definitions of everyday words even if you think you already know what they mean. 

With a smartphone, you can do that almost instantly at dictionary.reference.com. You might also subscribe to the excellent smartphone app called The Free Dictionary, which will send you a new word plus a comprehensive definition every day. 

Perfect Pitch: No thank you!

Whether you’re speaking in private to one client, or to a larger
group in a formal presentation, all good things must come to an
end. Sooner or later you will need to wrap it all up and stop talking. 

Just as what you say first is important, what you say last may be
even more essential. So what should it be? And what should it not be?

First off, don’t use “thank you” as a substitute for powerful closing phrase. It’s impossible to imagine Steve Jobs ending a presentation with “thank you.” The idea of Abraham Lincoln or Theodore Roosevelt doing so is positively laughable. Instead, think of a phase that summarizes your message in the fewest possible words – something that will stay in the head of your listener at least for the time it takes to reach the parking lot, and maybe even for a long time to come. Close with that phrase. Your listeners will be thankful that you did that, so don’t worry about thanking them.

Just as you shouldn’t start a business conversation with an apology, don’t end with one either.  “I guess I’ve rambled on long enough.” “I don’t know if I’ve made this clear, but I’ll stop now.” “I hope I haven’t bored you too much.” There are hundreds of these apologetic phrases floating around. On the surface, they seem to be charmingly self-deprecating – but they’re really “humble bragging,” a way speakers congratulate themselves for their own humility. They’re also an attempt to disarm any criticism from listeners by beating them to the punch.

Don’t make your windup disproportionately long. Don’t introduce a whole new idea in the final thirty seconds of your meeting. Stay on message. Be careful not to burden your conclusion with ideas or messages that you didn’t even mention in your presentation. That runs the risk of confusing your listener and obscuring your original message.

What you should be creating at the end is a summary, a conclusion, and a very concise call to action. This call to action should be congruent in both tone and content with all that you’ve said before. It should be clear and specific. Your listeners should be left with no doubt about what you're asking or recommending, and the reason to act should be framed in what matters to them. What big problem are you showing them how to solve? Why are you the one who’s best qualified to do that? Show how this conversation can translate into tangible benefits, and how your call to action serves their interests.

And again, don’t say thank you. If you’ve presented yourself correcting, they’ll be the ones doing the thanking.