Archives for January 2018

This is Part 2 of a series that I’m writing this week to help you be a better speaker.

Donald Trump is delivering the State of the Union as I type this.  You may not have voted for him.  You might not like him.  You might wonder why his tie is always so long, but when it comes to public speaking, there is something that he does that you could adopt immediately to become a better presenter.

It comes down to one command.

Move deliberately.

He moves when he speaks and it’s completely deliberate.

President Obama also did this.  And you’ll see it as a trait that is pretty much standard for the most effective communicators that you know.

Now, hear me closely on this.  Most speakers move.  You’ve seen it.  But there are only a handful that you have seen that move deliberately.

Let me explain.  Some people move as a default and as a nervous habit.  For instance:

• They sway back and forth and you get sea sick watching.

• They fiddle with their wardrobe, their fingernails, or their notes.

• They touch their face or fold their arms repeatedly.

These are movements, but they make the audience want to look away instead of pay attention.

However, I’m sure you’ve also seen people so stiff that birds actually begin to land on them when they’re speaking.  And like the birds that land, you want to fly away from their presentations.

The key is deliberate movements.  If you’re going to move, be mindful about it.

I have to speak every other weekend in front of four cameras and an audience that varies between 600 and 800.  When the system was first installed, I became aware of how my movements were distracting and automatic.  I had to think about each movement I made with regards to the camera director.

It taught me to be deliberate.

So here’s some starting points.

1.  Think of where you’re going not just of moving.  When I move, I pretend there is an imaginary “X” on the floor where I am moving to.  This way I’m not moving without a plan.

2.  Make your hand motions consistent with what you’re saying.   I talk with my hands a great deal.  It’s a great way to engage people.  However, make sure that you are using your hands to illustrate and not distract.  For instance, if you are talking about something that is HIGH ABOVE YOU, don’t make your hand motions low.

3.  Watch yourself and notice what things you do “automatically.”  We all have our default movements.  We have to distill those out and try to make the movement we have purposeful.  It’s going to feel a little like you are writing with the opposite hand that you are used to, but know that the payoff is more confident communication.

We pay attention to deliberate communicators.  You don’t have to be the president to communicate with purpose.  Don’t let the importance of what you have to say be overshadowed by messy movements.

This is Part 1 of a series that I’m writing this week to help you be a better speaker.

The Two Worst Words A Public Speaker Can Say

I had only been a minister at the church for two years, when it happened, and it hasn’t happened since.

The most devastating thing that can happen to a public speaker.

When someone was supposed to speak, and they don’t make it, and you’re forced to take their place.

That’s. The. Worst.

I have about twelve years more of speaking under my belt now than I did then, but giving an impromptu speech (or sermon) is similar to being thrown in the middle of a swimming pool during a swimming competition.  You keep thinking if you’re kicking a certain way you might fall in line, but at the end of the day you’re afraid of looking completely ridiculous and drowning (and peeing yourself and not knowing).

Here’s the scene: We had a world-famous missionary who wrote books, was interviewed on the 700 Club, and even had a documentary coming to speak.  It was such a big deal that people were bringing friends just to hear him.

But his plane was delayed.  And I got the call from the airport letting me know about it.  My wife and I had just ordered late lunch at Pizza Hut, and holy moly it was the worst pizza I ever tasted.

I had three hours to prepare a message.

I didn’t have any good sermons baking in the oven.  All I had was hope, and a stomach full of pepperoni.  I mean, come on, you didn’t want me to be rude to the people at Pizza Hut and not offer my patronage, did you?  That would be savage.

When I got to the pulpit, I used two words.  Two words that under most circumstances (I mean about 95% of all circumstances) you should never use when you are giving a speech.

Never.

I mean it.

I got up to a confused church and I made the best joke I ever made.  “I’m sorry, I know you expected filet mignon, but tonight you’re getting Cheerios.”

The joke was freaking amazing.  No one laughed because they were genuinely disappointed.  It was a 9.5 on my clever church joke rating scale.

But the two words were unforgivable.

“I’m sorry.”

Yep.  Don’t ever apologize for any reason during you’re talk.  Ever.

I replayed that sermon over and over in my head and I thought of why I used those two words to open the talk.  Here is the reason why I said, “I’m sorry” and the same reason why you do, too.

I was desperate to overcompensate for my lack of confidence and prepartation, so I pleaded for the sympathy of the audience.

There might be a smoother way to phrase that, but that’s the best I can do.  I wanted sympathy because I hoped I’d get some “awww’s” or “it’s okay’s” instead of just allowing my talk to speak for itself.  Quite frankly, I think it was one of the best sermons I ever preached.  The reasons for that belong in another discussion,  but the one thing I would change would be to start off by apologizing.

I’m going to share with you why starting off your talk apologetically is a total disaster.

1) You’re communicating in the first moments of your talk that it’s going to suck.  Yeah, that’s what you’re doing.  We say I’m sorry after bad things happen.  You, my friend, have just prophesied suckiness with the first two words.  And what are you apologizing for?  Because you’re speaking?  That’s garbage.

2) You are telling the audience that you’re only thinking of yourself.  This is a cardinal sin of communicating.  You’re not talking about what they’re going to experience, you’re letting them know what you’re thinking about speaking to them.  And you’re letting them know how bad it is.

A whole other subject of another post that I’m working on has to do with this very fact, but just accept this as gospel: your audience doesn’t care one iota how you feel about being up there.

3) You are degrading the content you’re about to share.  Similar to saying you’re talk is going to suck, you are basically offering up your content on the altar of pity.  You’re not letting the truth of what you have to say stand, you’re kicking the legs out from under it and hoping your audience sympathizes with its broken back and coddles you as it crashes.  (Too much metaphor?)

I know, this sounds harsh, but hear me out, it’s better I be frank with you about this than you get up and say, “I’m sorry.”

From a content standpoint, you’ve given the audience reason not to care about what you’re saying.  That’s hogwash.  There’s something good in there, but you are already telling them it’s not worth giving their full attention to it.

That’s enough.  I’m sorry there’s not more, but – well, no, no I’m not sorry.  This should be enough for you to never apologize about giving a talk again.

I’m not the best speaker, but I do it a lot.

I didn’t realize for a while that as a pastor, I speak more publicly in a year than most people speak publicly their whole lives.  That’s a sobering thought.  Because of this, I am always looking for ways to be better at public speaking.

I think the moment we feel that we’ve mastered something, that’s when we’re closest to become ineffective at it.

Here are some of the most recent things that I’ve learned, and if you have a presentation, this may help you.  We present more than we think.  You might not have 100 people in front of you, but maybe you just have three.  It’s your job to make them care about what you’re saying.

Here are some things:

1) Get right into it.  Yeah, this is new for me.  When I’ve opened my sermons before, I felt the need to welcome, talk about what we are going to talk about, then get into it.  I’ve found that 90% of what I said at the beginning is pretty useless.  I’m saying this for me, not you.

What’s useful is saying something that makes them want to know how it ends.  Or, something that makes them lean in.  That’s a good way to start.  They’ll wanna pick it up.  A joke.  A statement.  A statistic.  Something catching.

2) Smile more.  I have been watching myself on video for a while, and I noticed that my face sometimes is very unapproachable.   It’s always devastatingly handsome (sorry folks, can’t cage that beast), but it’s sometimes uninviting.

I want people to want to watch me and my facial expression, not feel judged or uncomfortable.  Therefore, operation friendly-face is underway.  I smile more, but I’m not trying to be weird or anything.

3) Use less notes.  When I first started speaking, I’d manuscript my talk (meaning, every single word was written out, even pauses), but over the years, I’ve used less and less notes.  Now, I’m down to one page, I’m trying to get it to a half page.  That’s my goal.  My ultimate goal is no notes at all.  But I’m going to climb up this mountain gradually.

I’ve found there is almost a mathematical correlation between my level of comfort delivering a talk and the amount of notes I have.  It’s not what you think.  The LESS notes I have, the MORE comfortable I feel.

4) Make eye contact.  I have typically looked towards people when speaking – like I’d stare at the window just behind them for focus on the back of the room, or look slightly up at the lights.  Recently, I’ve been looking at people in different parts fo the room.  Again, I’m not trying to be weird or anything.  I’m trying to engage them.

So if you catch me looking desperately into your eyes, know that it’s just my technique and applaud me without being offended or wigged out.

Those are four right now.  In time, I’d like to write more on this subject.  What are some of your best speaking tricks?

I grew up with a condition that renders my left eye almost completely useless.  It’s not noticeably lazy, but I can’t really read from it.  In fact, I only see shapes and colors if my right eye is covered.

Growing up, my parents offered me an eye patch.  In grade school in the 90s, that was a no-no. There weren’t many people emphasizing bullying then!  Ahhhh, perhaps I would have had a different life.

Anyway, I didn’t wear the patch.  I did sometimes after school, but not consistently.  This led to more and more blurriness and finally, pretty much a blind eye.

So when someone says to turn a blind eye to something, I can literally turn a blind eye.

This idea of focus haunts me.  I have thought of 2018 as a year of focus and definition.  And I sometimes wish I would have spent time strengthening my left eye, so that it would be useful.  But instead, I let the other eye do all the work.  Consequently, I have about 50% of the vision I could.

I think this is a chilling indictment of how many of us spend our lives. In fact, we don’t strengthen our focus or define our lives and values, and therefore, life happens to us instead of the other way around.

We react.

We don’t process things in a healthy way.

We don’t plan.

We don’t make goals.

We live day to day hoping to survive and not thrive.

Is that you?  Is that how you are?  Is that how your days are spent.

If it is, I’ll tell you what I have done and what I’d recommend. List some things that you’d like to define who you are.

Here are some things that define me.

1.  I want to be known and loved best by my wife and kids.  I think Mark Batterson said he wants to be most famous to the people that live within the four walls of his home.  What a great way to think of your life.

2. I want people to trust me and depend on me.  I want to work in any job with people feeling that they could trust me running their company.  This makes me feel professionally validated.

3. I want to be bold about what I want to do with my life.  I love making big plans and allowing those plans to force me to be more resourceful.

4. I want my faith to be the common thread of everything.  I hope that when people see me, they don’t think of as a pastor alone, but as a person who genuinely follows Christ who happens to work for a great church.

Have you ever thought of what you would like to define you?  Here’s something you could ask.  If you walked in on a conversation between two people that know you, what would you desire that they be saying?

Sam is trustworthy with his work.

My husband provides well and makes me feel secure.

My dad makes me feel important and loved.

Those are just some of my statements.

Think about your own. Because an undefined life is a dangerous life.  If you don’t define your life, others will for you.  Don’t spend your days with no vision.

Here I am, and I survived.

I looked at my first five scenes.  The first five scenes of my novel.  I started by reading it – just to read.  Here are some things that I noticed.

• Some of it is embarrassingly bad.
• Some of it is okay.
• All of it has opportunity.

Opportunity – that’s the operative word.  I am overwhelmed with opportunity.  And it feels great.

I looked at those first five scenes and I walked into the world that two months ago I created in the early pre-dawn mornings before doing my “real job” and I’ve come to the conclusion that that was the warm up.  Just from five scenes, I had explosions of ideas in my mind that weren’t coming when I cranked out those 2000 words for 30 days straight.

Here’s what I think you should do if you are just started to edit your book.  I’m open for suggestions, but this is what I’m doing.

1) I’m enjoying it.  Yeah, I am.  I love re-reading the plot of my story.  It’s been odd.  Part of me recalls some scenes with exquisite detail, and another part gets shocked about the plot.

2) I’m embracing opportunity.  I have been examining the characters of the story and there are so many different directions it could go.  That has been fueling me to really daydream about sub-plots and conflict.

3) I’m taking notes on every scene.  I know I’ve emphasized this in the past, but I really love the Scrivener APP and how you can take notes and keep a running tally of what needs done to fix the scenes.

All that being said, it feels otherworldly.  I have moments of happy surprise, and moments of horror!  But at the end of the day, I encourage myself with one truth:

I wrote a book.  It’s a book that I didn’t have a year ago, and nothing will change that.

Keep reading and writing!

December 31, I was pumped.

I had all the ingredients – a planner, written goals, pronouncements of how things were going to happen, and even a year calendar to chart my progress.

I had invested about 20 hours of the last week of the year to my personal development and how I was going to structure everything – from my exercise goals all the way to my writing goals.  All of it planned like an architect’s layout for a skyscraper.

And then it happened, much like all of you.

I got the freaking flu.

Yeah, I did.  And I had a busy week at work and with my side work.  It all hit at once.  So I worked my way through it, but I lost the night and the mornings (because that’s when I felt the worst).

No writing.  Exercise, yeah, right.  Diet, forget about it!  I ate garbage because it was convenient.

What about those updates to the calendar.  They all froze.  More blank space there than Taylor Swift.

Today was the first day in almost two weeks the I felt somewhat normal again, and I looked and realized I lost about two weeks.

And my first thought was this: what’s the point?

Did you ever feel that way?

Whatever, I’ve had these plans but I’ll just go and revert back to the way I’ve been.  What a joke!

But this is the first time I entertained a second thought.  Here was the second thought:

So what?  Seriously.  I started off rocky because I’m sick, but if I do one thing today to keep myself remotely on track, I’d be better than I was two weeks ago.

This is the first time that I’ve really given myself the grace to fail a little.  Boy, was it a great moment.

Here are some things I want you to consider about your New Year’s resolutions that you’re about to set on fire and abandon.

1) They aren’t going away.  No, not at all.  You think that you are just going to be happy with status quo.

Ain’t. Gonna. Happen.

Jon Acuff, New York Times Bestselling Author says “The Dreams that we give up on don’t go away, they become ghosts that haunt us in the quiet moments of our day.”

Yeah, so when you get a free moment, you’re going to say “I should have been at the gym.  I should be writing.  I should be working on that organizational chart that I had planned.”

You haven’t dropped your resolution, you’ve only deferred it.

For me, it’s getting healthier.  I’ve come to the conclusion that even though I haven’t gone to the gym in two weeks, If I just throw that away now, I’m not going to wake up and be like “yeah, good thing I feel like garbage and I have low lung capacity.  Good thing I can’t see my feet!  Whew!  I almost lived a life where a brisk walk didn’t make me have to change my clothes, good thing I took this road.

It’s not going to happen.  So the best time to start working on the you that you want to be is today.  Don’t defer it.  Because on December 31, 2018, you’re gonna be putting the same stuff on the list.

2) Talk to yourself about failing the way you would talk to your friend or your child.  This is a great exercise.  If I came to you and said, “Hey man, I really messed up this week.  I didn’t go the gym.  I didn’t eat well either. In fact, I went to taco bell almost every day because of the Chalupas.  I couldn’t avoid their tantalizing balance between crispy and chewy.”

What would you say to me?  Seriously, what would you tell me?

Now, some of your advice may vary, but here’s what you probably wouldn’t say.

Wow, you are gonna be fat forever.  I didn’t realize what kind of a loser you were until we just talked.

Good job on sucking at everything.

Why are you even trying?

You’re selfish, you didn’t even offer me Taco Bell, you self-centered fatty, you.

Maybe you’d say the last one, but probably nicer.

The point is, you wouldn’t talk to me this way.  But this is how you’re talking to yourself, isn’t it?

So, instead, say something like this.

Hey, you’ve had a tough week, and I could see how you’d be discouraged, but just jump back in.

Yeah, it’s a struggle for sure, but I’ve seen you overcome struggles before, and once you get started, you kill it!

Dude, I know.  I’ve been tempted too, but don’t go too crazy.  Make today the day you really begin and just try to do a little better and you’ll get there.

The best conversation you can invest in is the conversation you have with yourself.  If you treat yourself like a fat loser who is unmotivated and who will never succeed at anything, your behavior will align with your beliefs.

3) You can change strategy to accommodate setbacks.  Okay, so this is huge.  When something you are doing doesn’t work, don’t drop the vision or the goal.  However, I give you total permission to drop the strategy.

For instance, if you committed to P90X for the first quarter of the year, but you found Day 2 of P90X impossible and you skipped Day 3, and here we are on January 16, and you’re still on Day 2, perhaps P90X is not your best strategy.  Perhaps it’s too intense.

Or, if you are going to the gym daily, but you aren’t seeing results or your discouraged at the time investment, perhaps P90X would wok for you because of its intensity.

Strategies are NOT sacred.  But don’t give up on your goal.  You may simply have to adjust the strategy to help you get there.

That’s it.  Don’t give up on yourself.  Don’t defer the resolutions.  Your life isn’t over.  And the desire for you to make it better isn’t going away.

I know we’ve all been there, right?

When you realize you accidentally wrote two novels instead of one.  Right?  Can I get an amen?

Well, I don’t know how common it is, but I definitely did it.  I wrote two completely different novels inside of one.  In November, I became a Novelist.  I wrote just shy of 80,000 words in 30 days.  I was stoked.

But I realized after starting to review some editing concepts, specifically those put forth by Shawn Coyne and Tim Grahl at the Storygrid podcast, a site I highly highly highly recommend, I had, in fact, written two different books.

I realized that I wrote two books because they covered two different genres.  I considered this my first step from writing mode to editing mode.

This is my observation: writing that cruddy first daft was to get it out of my head.  Editing that draft was to make it palatable to get into the heads of those that would read it, and find enjoyment in it.

With that being said, I found myself straddling several genres.

Epic Fantasy

Horror

Mystery

Drama

While there are ingredients of a lot of these genres in many of our favorite books, I wasn’t staying true to the conventions of any particular genre.  But I realized that this could be corrected by one simple observation.

I wrote two books instead of one.

Why would I make this jump?  What am I thinking?

If you, like me, are editing right now, here are some questions you want to consider.

1) What would make someone want to read your book?  Sure, I get it.  You enjoyed the creative liberty of spewing your mind onto the document that now has become your book.  Yes, you can write whatever you want and no one can say a thing about it!  Kudos.

However, eventually you want someone to read the thing, right?

This one troubled me a little.  The thought of altering what I wrote to entice the reader for further buy-in felt, I don’t know, dirty.

But then I examined my own motives.

When I’m writing, I’m doing it for the fun and thrill of it.  I’m creating.  And it’s for me.  But truth be told, I want what I write to move people.   And if I want to move people, I have to care about their experience while reading.  Therefore, if writing is about me, editing is about them.

2) What do I enjoy and what makes me cringe a little?  If writing the first draft is about getting anything and everything written down, editing is about being the critic that you’ll have to face at some point.

What part of your book stinks?  What makes it drag or feel like it’s lacking in consistency?  There has to be a willingness to have an organ transplant to save it (stole this from a new friend and fellow author, Cameron Matthews).

3) What happens when you’re done?  I know what I’m going to do about this, but it’s an important question because it’s giving me some action steps.  I’m planning on self-publishing and making this first book a part of a series.  I’m excited about that part of it.  It’s the editing that’s scaring me (read my post about Write Fright).

At any rate, these decisions take place before you publish.  If you really examine, maybe you’ll find that you wrote two books and not one!

In November of last year, I did something that I’ve wanted to do since I was in grade school.

I became a fiction writer.

Didn’t attend a seminar.  Didn’t get someone to tell me I was a writer.  Didn’t get an MFA degree.  Instead, I sat at my keyboard and produced a novel.

I actually wrote two novels (we’ll get to that in a later post).

It was honestly, one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done in my life.  Not writing “the end.”  Not the fact that I have a book under my belt.  But the joy of sitting there and letting the words decorate the empty page.  And at the conclusion of a session, I felt like a professional.

I felt almost like I was the conduit for some supernatural transmission.  It was otherworldly and I felt such a close and total dependence on God for those words specifically.

It was hard, but boy it was so easy.

It was easy as pie compared to what I’m going to share with you.

For the past 2 weeks I’ve been struggling with something called “write fright”

Yeah, it’s mine.  I coined it.

It’s a condition I’ve developed that has prohibited me from opening this book that I’ve written to edit it.  I took a planned four weeks away from the project in December, but write fright set in right around January 2.

Symptoms of Write Fright include but are not limited to:

-Overall feeling of dissatisfaction with work.

-Lack of knowing which direction to go.

-Distraction-itis (I watched three seasons of Parenthood).

-Feeling that maybe you’ve written the worst thing ever.

-Thinking other writers are so much more ahead than me.

So, that’s the general diagnosis. I’m aware now that I’m heading into the six-week mark.  I’m encouraged by this because Stephen King says that you should take six weeks off of your project to let it rest and give your mind a chance to get away from it. However, the last two weeks have been scarier than the writing.

So here’s what I’m going to do (self-prescription).  And if any of you are writers and you’re struggling with first-book angst as well, maybe you can follow this too.

1) I’m going to read the thing and blog about it.  During NaNoWriMo, i wrote 500 words per day about how the process was going.  I didn’t care who was reading it, but if three people were, I was accountable to those three people to produce content and produce a blog about producing content (somehow there is a reference to Inception in here).

2) I’m going to start doing easier things along side editing to make it seem more real.  As of right now, I just have words in a word processing app.  However, I’m going to begin to do the technical legwork of actually publishing this thing even though it’s not close to ready.  For instance, I’m going to reach out to beta readers, figure out how to do an email list, sign up for accounts on Amazon, Kobo and Ingram Spark for distribution, and shop cover designers.

3) I’m going to rely heavily on other authors who have encouraged me.  There are a handful of writers that really reached out to me when I started doing this.  That meant the world.  I look up to each of them because they’re somewhere I want to go and it looks as though they all lead big lives.  I may be bothering them a little bit during this process, but I’ll take that chance!

All that said, Monday is it.  NaNoEdMo (maybe it’s a thing) 2018.  Stay tuned.