Most large corporations have a budget for executive education, and the question becomes, “Where do we spend the money?”

If the choice is between the intellectual/cognitive vs. the emotional/affective, choose the latter.

Reasons Why

Information metastasizes every day. New books, magazines, journals, websites, documentaries, and research are published every day of the year in every country around the globe. Information is a commodity, and too much of it is a brain killer. A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. Executives already have too much information.

Executives need better judgment, not more information. They need to make decisions and predictions based on information brought to them by trusted employees. They need to make better decisions and better predictions based on a limited amount of information. Sending them to acquire more information in an educational program is quite possibly not only a waste of time and money, but could also be damaging to the quality of the decisions the executive makes.

Information is conflicting. Consult with company A and you get one thing. Choose B and you get another. Their methods of gathering information varies, and their methods for analyzing it differs. You might as well choose either one and get to work improving your judgment.

Judgment comes from thinking about thinking. It comes from meta-cognition. The Buddhist tradition might call it mindfulness, the ability to be aware of your awareness. Executives who are not aware of their awareness, or who don’t know themselves, are dangerous to themselves and their enterprises.

Logic does not rule. Psychology rules. Those who are aware of their own awareness, mindful of their own minds, know just how illogical we are. The amount of crazy flotsam that washes up into consciousness from the seething sea of the subconscious is truly astounding. It’s a surreal cinema, and we are both director and audience. To think that the power of this reality does not rule the bulk of our lives is naïve. Most of the conversation in the world is intra-personal and goes on between our awareness and the savage, terrified imagination.

Good judgment about human psychology is powerful.

Sims Wyeth & Co. provides public speaking courses, executive speech coaching, presentation skills training, voice and speech training, speech writing, and courses that address stage fright, body language, presentation strategy, and effective use of PowerPoint, all of which contribute to greater executive presence and personal impact. 

I recently came across Lillipip, a company that creates animated videos about your product, service, or concept.  Check them out. 

They have a simple storyboarding template of four blank squares.  In the first, you draw or paste a picture of your client in pain, along with the exclamation that’s coming out of your customer’s mouth.  Nice and simple.

Then, you draw or paste a picture of the visual metaphor for your product, service, or concept.  For example, a health club might visualize itself as being able to turn a couch potato into an Adonis.

In the third panel, you draw or paste a picture of your client– happy after you’ve removed the pain.  Again, you also draw the exclamation that comes out of the client’s mouth.

Finally, in the fourth panel, you draw or paste a picture of you, your logo, or your product, and write one thing you want the client to do or remember.

This is good stuff for presenters too.  It helps us think visually.  It keeps our presentations focused on our listeners’ problems, and forces us to present solutions.   It makes us think about emotions in addition to information.  It encourages us to use metaphor, which is the ability to link what is new to something familiar. And finally, it demands that we have a call to action at the end of our presentation.

Plus, it helps those of us who are word people speak the language of picture people, which gives us stereophonic input into the brains of both tribes.

Sims Wyeth is an executive speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.

Harvard and Google got married (NY Times article, Fri Dec 17) and have given birth to a database containing all the words in all the books published between 1500 and 2008 in English, German, French, Spanish, Chinese and Russian.
 
You—yes you—can find this database on line and search for a single word or particular phrase up to five words long and track its birth, life, decline, ascent or long-term flat-line existence.  You will see, in graphic terms, how frequently your word or phrase appears from year to year.
 
This is very cool for language historians:  they will be able to track the evolution of words and phrases. The question is what will the rest of us use it for?
 
We can use it to recognize this truth: key words repeated throughout a speech or presentation will live a long life in the minds of our listeners, and as a result, can have considerable influence over them.

For instance, if you use words such as “slow,” “patient,”, and “easy” when speaking to a group, and then ask them to go stand on a line to wait for something, they are more likely to wait placidly and politely than another group that did not hear those words spoken prior to waiting. 

Speech has power to change behavior.  Using a word repeatedly has power too.  Choose your key words strategically and speak them often to create the behaviors you’re looking for.

Sims Wyeth is an executive speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.