How to establish your credibility without bragging

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It’s hard to pull-off establishing your credentials without sounding like you’re bragging. The public speaking blogosphere is alive with stories of presenters who didn’t quite hit the right note. Lisa Braithwaite says in her blog post on establishing your credentials, they haven’t come to the presentation to hear all about you. Dave Paradi also warns against talking about yourself too much.

It’s like we have a braggart alarm bell. We’ve learnt not to trust people who speak too well of themselves. So how can you avoid setting off the braggart alarm bells of your audience while still establishing your authority to speak on the topic?

The secret is to make it look as if it’s not you doing the bragging.

1. Have someone else introduce you

In Yes: 50 secrets from the art of persuasion, Cialdini and his co-authors say:

Arranging for someone else to describe your expertise and credentials to the audience will do wonders to convince them that they should listen to what you have to say, while also avoiding the damage that blatant self-promotion can cause.

Prepare this introduction yourself

Having someone else introduce you, doesn’t mean you leave them to it - very few people prepare properly for introducing a speaker. And there’s also a risk that your introducer says something which is at odds with the message you want to send in your presentation. I have a good friend who speaks across UK, Australia and New Zealand on Values Education in schools. She has a Christian background but strongly believes in Values Education being non-religious in nature. Before one particular presentation, her introducer dwelt on her Christian “credentials”. The audience peppered her with questions about the relationship between her Christian beliefs and values education throughout the presentation.

Tailor your introduction to the presentation

The audience doesn’t want to hear a generic resume. They want to hear:

• Why this topic? How is this topic of benefit to them
• Why you? What special skills/expertise have you got which makes you qualified to speak to them on this topic
• Why now? Why is it important to hear from you at this time.

For more ideas on preparing an introduction check out Taking charge of your introduction from Denise Graveline.

When it’s your turn

Plunge straight into your presentation. Beware of falling into the trap of saying “Well, as the chairperson said my name is Olivia Mitchell, and I’m from a company called Effective Speaking.” Doh!

2. Provide attendees with a written profile

If there’s no-one to introduce you, write a profile detailing your experience and qualifications to be talking on this topic. Ensure the attendees have it ahead of time. Write it in the third person, rather than the first person. For example “Olivia has been teaching presentation skills for ten years” as opposed to “I’ve been teaching presentation skills for ten years”.

It’s a subtle distinction which makes a big difference. Here’s a description of a research study led by Jeffrey Pfeffer, and reported in Yes:

…participants were asked to imagine themselves in the role of senior editor for a book publisher, facing the task of dealing with an experienced and successful author. They were asked to read excerpts from a negotiation for a sizeable book advance. One group read excerpts touting the author’s accomplishments spoken by the author’s agent, whereas a second group read identical comments made by the author himself.  The data  verified our hypothesis: participants rated the author more favourable on nearly every scale - especially likeability - when the author’s agent sang his praises as compared to when the author tooted his own horn.

Even though we know intellectually that personal profiles written in the third person were probably written by the person themselves - it doesn’t set off our braggart alarm bell.

3. Tell a story

Tell a short personal story which serves both as an introduction to your topic and subtly signals your expertise in the area. When I’m introducing myself at the start of our introductory presentation skills course for nervous beginners, I tell the participants about the time I was enveloped with fear giving the first important presentation of my career. They can relate to this and can see that I have managed to overcome that fear. But I don’t come across as bragging. That’s because the information about my credentials is incidental to the main story and so slips through the back door into the audiences’ minds without setting off their braggart alarm bell.

So there’s three ways of establishing your credibility without being a braggart. It doesn’t matter that they audience may intellectually realise that you’ve written all the material, emotionally they’re fooled.

Are there other ways that you’ve pulled off this trick - let us know in the comments.

Lessons from Cialdini #2: How to persuade using the power of the negative

Pop psychology culture says focus on the positive. But if you do, you’re missing out on huge persuasive power.

In Yes: 50 secrets from the science of persuasion Robert Cialdini and his co-authors explore the concept of “loss aversion“. Loss aversion means that most people would rather avoid a loss than receive a benefit. You can use the power of loss aversion by thinking carefully about how you frame your messages.

This was demonstrated by researchers from the University of California. They told one group of homeowners that they could save 50 cents a day by carrying out energy efficiency improvements in their home. They told a second group of homeowners that they would continue to lose 50 cents a day if they did nothing. The second group were 300% more likely to carry out the improvements.

How can you use the psychology of loss aversion to persuade your audience:

1. Frame benefits in terms of loss

Let’s say you’re presenting to the senior management team of your organisation on the need to implement a new software system. Rather than talk about the time savings (a benefit) talk about the productivity loss that the organisation will continue to suffer if the software is not introduced.

2. Remind your audience of the problems they’re facing

We were working recently with a project manager in charge of implementing organisation-wide change. She was concerned that the management team weren’t doing enough to drive the project forward. She started her presentation by reminding the management team of a recent project that was behind schedule and at risk of failure because they weren’t driving it. Getting the audience to connect with current problems is an effective motivational tool.

3. Engage your audience with the consequences of doing nothing

We often work with public officials involved with emergency management. One of their major roles is motivating the public to “Be Prepared” for a major earthquake or flood. The most effective way of doing this is to paint a picture of what life might be like immediately after an earthquake for the unprepared - worried because they can’t contact members of their family, hungry because they have no emergency food supplies, unable to wash because of lack of water.

So don’t dimiss the power of the negative in your next presentation.

Lessons from Cialdini: what can we learn from hotel towels?

Robert Cialdini is recognised as an authority on persuasion. His latest book Yes: 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion co-authored with Noah Goldstein and Steve Martin has many nuggets for presenters. I’ll be reviewing these in a series of posts. Here’s the first one:

We are strongly persuaded by what people like us do.

In the book Cialdini and his co-authors outline a series of experiments on the cards in hotel bathrooms attempting to persuade us to reuse the towels. The standard appeal on these cards is to our concern for the environment. The authors experimented with changes to the wording on these cards. Here’s what they found:

• Guests who were told that most other guests reused their towels, were 26% more likely to reuse their towels than those who saw the standard message.
• Guests who were told that most other guests who stayed in their particular room, were 33% more likely to reuse their towels than those who saw the standard message.

So what does this mean when you are seeking to persuade in a presentation.

1. If other people are doing or supporting what you want your audience to do, bring that into your presentation. Here are some ways of doing that:

• find an endorsement from a credible expert that your audience knows and trusts
• use testimonials from people similar to your audience
• develop case studies of people/organisations that are similar to your audience
• use statistics to show how many people are using your product or taking action (this is taking it from the micro to the macro).

2. Be subtle about the way that you do this. If you tell people “Of course, you’re going to be persuaded by what other people have done” this will backfire on you. When Cialdini asked people whether other people’s behaviour influences their own, they insisted that it did not. We don’t like to think of ourselves as simply doing what other people do.

3. If you’re trying to persuade your audience not to do something, don’t focus on the number of people who are doing it. The implicit message that people will take away is that other people are doing it, and therefore it’s OK. Cialdini gives an example of a sign at Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park which said:

Your heritage is being vandalized every day by theft losses of petrified wood of 14 tons a year, mostly a small piece at a time.

The book authors experimented with these signs. They used marked pieces of petrified wood along the trails to see how much visitors would steal. When there was no sign 2.92% of the pieces were stolen. When the sign above was used, 7.92% of the pieces were stolen! So despite the good intentions of the National Park management they were actually promoting the stealing of petrified wood.

Persuasion based on what other people do is called using “Social Proof”. As you can see it’s a powerful persuasive tool for using - with care and discretion - in your presentations.

In the next post in this series, I’ll look at the surprising results that Cialdini and his co-authors report on the use of negativity in persuasive messages.

The 6 reasons why face-to-face presenting is more persuasive

Seth Godin recently posted that as online methods of engaging and interacting improve, the expectations for face-to-face interactions such as sales calls, presentations and conferences will increase:

In other words, “I flew all the way here for this?” is going to be far more common than it used to be.

This got me thinking about whether we will continue to have face-to-face presentations. Does face-to-face presenting have an edge over video-conferencing and other online presentation technology?

I think so. Face-to-face presenting is inherently more persuasive. For many of us this is intuitive. If you want to persuade someone, going to see them is likely to be more effective than the phone, and the phone is likely to be more effective than sending them an e-mail.

Social psychologist Robert Cialdini in his classic work Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion identifies six weapons of influence. Here’s how these factors can be more effective in a face-to-face setting:

1. Reciprocation - we feel some obligation to return favors.
If a person has made the effort to prepare and deliver a face-to-face presentation, we are likely to reciprocate by carefully considering what they say. We owe them that. When I watch a presentation online and the presenter fails to engage me I have no hesitation in clicking away.  I’ve only once left a live presentation - and I felt awful doing it.

2. Commitment and consistency - if people make a commitment, they are likely to follow through on it.
Attending a live presentation and devoting time to it, is a form of commitment. So in order to act consistently with that commitment, audience members may be more likely to take action based on the presentation.

3. Social proof - we look to other people as guidance on how to act.
Being part of an audience is a very different experience to watching a video of the same presentation online by yourself. Could this be because the behaviour of other people helps us form our own response to the presenter.

4. Authority - we tend to obey authority figures.
Are we more likely to judge someone as authoritative when we see them face to face? I think this is likely.

5. Liking - we’re more easily persuaded by people we like.
Deciding whether we like someone we’ve seen or met online, takes time. Meeting people face-to-face, we can make millisecond judgments about whether we like them.

6. Scarcity - believing something is scarce makes us want it.
A live presentation is by definition scarce - being part of it is to feel part of something exclusive and special. When we see something on the internet, in most cases, we know that it’s also available to millions of other people - nothing special or exclusive about that.

You’ve likely visited the TED website. Hundred of good quality videos of fantastic presentations. It’s almost like being there! But it’s not. And despite the fact that I can watch all the presentations online, I would still love to be invited and I would pay to go.

Humans evolved in a face-to-face world.  We are optimised for the face-to-face situation. I believe face-to-face presenting will continue to have a persuasive edge. What do you think?

I wrote all this and then I read Guy Kawasaki’s post about amazing new technology from Cisco and Musion Systems. See it in action here. Three people on stage in Bangalore, India, but only one of them is really there - two of them are “holographic presences” beamed in from San Jose, California. From an audience point of view, there appears to be no distinction between the three men. I believe we would be fooled into reacting as if they were all face-to-face with us.