#1952 Public Speaking - Bobby Cappuccio

warrant jernalize and think about it. It's the powerful it's the power of the pause.

think it was today. I saw it today anyway, on your ig you posted something like overcoming your fear of public speaking, and I thought, while we have spoken about it in the two thousand shows or so that we've had here, and you and I in the hundred or so that you and I have done together, I don't know how many, by the way, it's probably more than that,

but we've opened the door a bit. But I thought it wouldn't be terrible to do an entire conversation around the idea of being more comfortable, more competent, more skilled, whatever at doing that thing, and whether or not that's you know, talking at your own birthday, having say in a few words at your fortieth birthday when you're terrified, or speaking in a conference room to a thousand people, or anything in between. Yeah, why did you post that?

And what do you Let's let's start the wheels turning. Where do you start with this with people? Is there a start?

although doing public presentations is definitely part of that. I'm talking about someone who gets up to give a toast at a wedding, or someone who has to do a presentation for the board, or they're a team leader, they're a manager, and they got to get up and present to their team and they either panic or they which means they completely free, or they overthink and they start to choke. And this becomes a major stumbling block for people.

And you know, if you take doctor Albert Ellis came up with something that's widely used in cognitive behavior therapy, and it's the ABC process. There's ABC D, but basically it's that you have an activating event the A and this is something that causes you stress. It's associated with adversity, Like you're thinking about, I've got to give a presentation, you know, tomorrow or in the next hour. Some people

it could be even next week. And then if you jump from A to C, right, the consequence consequence is what happens when you're in that situation that is causing you to feel a sensation that you're interpreting as an emotion. You don't want to feel stress, and it could be well, I start to get sweaty pumps, I start to hyperventil I start to think about you know, what happens when I get up in front of the room and just people are tuned out, They're just staring off out into space.

Oh they hate this. I'm not connecting. I'm not going to get that promotion. And when you're in that state of stress physiologically, what happens to your frontal lopes. Well, you know, they downregulate and performance drops. So even you thinking that thought and being fixated on what's going on inside, if you rather them what's going on with the people in front of you, and being able to assess that accurately,

you invariably bring down your own level of performance. So it's if you take a look at what's in between A and C, it's B and B stands for belief. Yeah, well that could be it too, but it's whatever you're interpreting, whatever you believe about that scenario is going to dictate what's going on side of you emotionally and how you're responding to what's happening inner world with what you're projecting into your outer world. So and this cuts both ways.

Let's say we take two people, right Jane. Jane gets up and she's speaking in front of the board, and she notices that somebody in the back of the room they just started looking at their phone and now they're just texting. And then she took a look at another person in the board and they're staring up the ceiling. Instantly, Jane starts to interpret that the belief there is, Oh, they are so tuned out. I am completely bombing. This is why I got passed over last year. They're not

gonna hand me any more important projects. You know, they're downsizing around here. Am I even gonna have it? She's thinking about all of this. She's no longer even with the group. She's in her head. No matter how good her presentation was supposed to be, it's not gonna be anywhere near as good. And she's probably gonna not be able to wait until she gets out of the room. And every time that she presents holding that belief, she's

gonna create that self fulfilling prophecy. It's not the activating event. It's not the consequence physiologically and behaviorally, it's the belief about what's happening. I mean, for all, she knows that person could have gotten an emergency text message that their kid is sick at school. What she's not noticing is the members of the board that are close to her are nodding their head into agreement. What she's not noticing is two people were leaning back in their chair. That

doesn't mean anything, by the way, it's not disinterest. They could be comfortable. But what she didn't notice is they went from leaning back in their chair and when she made her third point, they both leaned in and they were engaged. So she's noticed everything in line with her belief. She's dismissing everything that's not in line with her belief. So in that video, what we do is we restructure the rules so it's impossible to have well, it's not impossible,

that's ridiculous. It's a lot harder to suffer from performance anxiety because what we do with this person, let's say Jane, is we ask her, okay, on a scale from one to ten, how good of a presenter do you reckon you are? And doesn't matter Let's say she's like, I'm five. You know, I'm not the worst presenter, but by far not the best presenter in my department. I'm sort of mediocre. Well, what I would ask Jane is, well, tell me what

makes a five a five? Why'd you say that? And then she's in one of our classes where we're teaching public speaking skills. I might ask Jane to get up in front of the room and show me a five. Show me that five presentation, and then I'll stop her a minute or so into it, and I'll say, all right, Jane, let's tweak this a little bit. Show me how you can do just a little bit worse. Show me a four, and then we'll take it to Okay, show me a three.

We'll go all the way down to one. And the reason why this works is if you're having performance anxiety, like I'm not really good at this, Well, the rules are let's see how bad you can be, And there's usually a couple of responses. One, I cannot experience the same level of performance anxiety because if I fail, I've succeeded according to the rules. Two, I'm getting the person to start to play around with range. So if you can intentionally make your presentation much much worse within a

matter of minutes. And by the way, I've never met anyone who cannot. And some people are even embarrassed to do this, but eventually they get there, their presentation is atrocious.

they're not laughing at you, they're laughing with you. So now you have social support and cohesion. And that's like, Okay, Jane, take me back to that five again. I want to see that five one more time, but this time the five is a different representation of the five. She thinks she's showing you a five, but the rest of the room, and what she realizes soon is the five. Now minutes later is much better that it was ten to fifteen minutes ago. And then it's like, okay, show me a six,

let's take it to eight to nine to ten. And we're working within range of emotion and expression and energy. So we're working on behavioral things that create an intrinsic state. And if you can play with locus of control in one direction, you can do it another. So there's a lot of reasons why that particular exercise that we talked about in the video works really really well.

her on our show. The self help antidote great, And she was talking about you know, like the I mean, it's like so many things. It's not like, oh, you're traumatized. All right, here, do this, you won't be anymore. Like it's so it's so complicated, it's so contextual, it's so

variable depending on a range of bloody factors. But she did talk on a level about how she didn't say these exact words, but we kind of traumatize ourselves based on a reaction to a thing, like something happens, and then the trauma is our response to the thing that happens. And somebody else might have the same thing happen and out of their control happening in their physical world, the thing happens and they are not traumatized. Now this is not a criticism or a praise of anyone, but rather

an awareness. Right, so that being able to, you know, knowing that people get on stage who are calm, and knowing that people get on stage who are terrified, or knowing that people have got to do a talk of their best mates fiftieth and they're terrified or they can't wait, they're excited. It's not about the fiftieth It's not about the situation or circumstance. It's about how you as an individual respond to that. It's about the impact based on the story you tell or as you say, the belief

you have. What's my story about the thing I've got to do this Saturday night at Bobby's birthday. It's Bobby's birthday. Amy asked me to say a few things. Oh my god. Right, So it's not about the birthday or the speech. It's about my fucking response and my story and then my subsequent anxiety and all of these things. I mean what

you're saying. I but for people who don't have that at their disposal or access, where does someone start who's listening to this, going, that's cool, Bobby, But I don't have that person to walk me through that or talk me through that process is, you know, is desensitizing ourselves. You know, just exposure therapy good is like well, fuck, I'm just gonna I'm going to talk to my phone and do a one minute presentation and then watch it back and then I'm going to send it to someone.

Or like, what's like some practical shit that we can do that will move the needle in a short ish period of time, Like practical, real world stuff that we can do.

to give a presentation. We all did. It was like one of those quarterly updates. And when I sat down to give a quarterly update on the three strategic initiatives that I'm working on in order to accomplish our north Star goals, There's there's a couple of people in the room, and no matter what I say, they always think it's the stupidest thing they have ever heard. And it irritated Like there's nothing I could say that will not irritate them and make them think that that was the stupidest

comment in the whole whole meeting. So I'm sitting there and I'm like, God, I really don't even want to speak right now. I'm just like looking at them like this still happens to me, And I'm so nervous because these two people and I'm trying so hard to please for reasons beyond the show that I'm hitting these buttons and all these pop up boxes are appearing all over the slide. I don't know how to get them off. So and you know, I thought about a teaching from

Marcus Aurelius, where you know, in Meditations. What's really interesting is this is arguably one of the most powerful people who have ever lived, could have had anything he wanted, faced with temptations, none of us could ever even have them. But what he was so preoccupied with was virtue and abuse of power. I don't ever want to abuse this power. And he never thought anyone would read Meditations. So it's

brutal honesty. It's a book to himself. And the reason why I'm bringing this up is because one of the remarkable things was his perspective on greatness, right, because I get irritated with the top of greatness people like achieve greatness, and I'm going to put it. It's like we're human beings. We can get a virus tomorrow, be gone by Saturday.

So like, what is when you say greatness? What does that mean to Marcus Aurelia's greatness was no matter what situation you're in, no matter what position or status you're holding, always intend to do the greatest good with the resources you have from where you are. So for me, it was like, Okay, I'm going to say this one thing

and I'm going to make this one point emphatically. I am going to practice right now because this is important and it involves other people in their career development, and I am going to elevate my level of intensity and the emotion that I'm feeling. I am going to project that and play with that range, and I'm going to make eye contact with people who I know in the room are wanting to hear this and they're going to

resonate with it. So that was just ten seconds practice that, and after I went through, I went through an assessment. I said, Okay, what did I do particularly well in this presentation. It's like, well, first thing is I sat down and I gave it right. I could have gotten up and walked out of the room. Wouldn't have been a very good idea for the room for the meeting

of my career, but I could have done that. Second thing is I identified what part of this is going to galvanize and excite people that because it aligns with their career aspirations, and I chose to control and focus on my delivery in that particular moment. Oh and by the way, after the meeting, somebody came up to me and said, oh, can I speak to you? I have that aspiration? Can you help me get there? Absolutely have my full commitment.

So that was a success. Second question is if I can go back in time and do that meeting all over again, what would I have done differently, and not just in the presentation inside my own head? Would I have changed what I was focusing on? Okay, great, So now I learned two things. I learned what I did well so I could duplicate that and create on demand. Two. I can't control the outcome of that presentation, but I can learn from it and leverage that to be more

effective next time. So when you look at the work of doctor Martin Sella and he talks about explanatory style, explanatory style is what you say to yourself after an event, and there are three elements to a explanatory style that are important. It's personal, permanent, and pervasive. So if I walked out of that presentation and say, oh god, I always drop the ball. I am so stupid. Well, that's permanent. Can't fix stupid, can you. It's personal, it's me right,

and it's pervasive. It's not like, ah, I'm so stupid in instances when Nope, I'm just I'm just generally stupid in all situations. Like exceeding all things, I want a couple of things happen. One, I'm probably not gonna try. Two, I can't learn anything from that. So when you have that explanatory style, it's dishonest. Whether it's like I'm amazing what you're amazing at all times with all things, now, that's probably not honest. You want to be balanced between

a strong internal and external frame of reference. When when you implement something like this or that thing that you don't want to say in a meeting, you practice saying it emphatically or you know what, I'm gonna stand up and I'm gonna have fun with the toast because I know if I completely stuff this toast up, everyone's gonna laugh and that's gonna be great. So I'm gonna lean into it. I'm gonna try to fail, I'm gonna I'm gonna play but and then after always go through that

explanatory style and balance internal and external frames. An internal frame is where you take responsibility for what you did in the moment that produced that outcome, both the good and you know the could be better, but also what happened externally outside of you, because not everything's in your control. You know, was there a time crunch and you didn't have time to prepare? That's something that you can learn from. Did somebody point to you and go, hey, uh, Craig, oh,

pop up? And you know, we'd love to love for you to say a few words. I need to get better at creating on demand in the moment because I don't know when these things are going to happen. But if you go too far to an external frame of reference, that becomes an attribution era where nothing's ever your fault

or your responsibility. It's all things outside of yourn. If you go too far to an internal frame of reference, everything's your fault, and you start to go from constructively dissecting elements that allow you to progress and get better incrementally even though it's uncomfortable, and you start adapting global explanatory styles where if you're just dumb or if you just suck in front of a room, why would you ever try to get better? It's not possible for you,

it's not accessible for you. So it's balancing the explanatory style and balancing internal external frames or reference, putting yourself in challenging but relatively safe situations where you can practice presenting in a way that aligns with the person who you want to be and have the impact you want to have, and eventually you'll get better and better and it won't be like I'm going to say this thing

in a meeting. Maybe it's I'm going to lead a meeting two months from now, or maybe next time my company has a conference they send me to represent them six months later because and I love what you said about you know, and do it in a way where it'll feel uncomfortable, but you remove yourself from being overwhelmed with anxiety in the moment where oh my goodness, my boss watched this and now now they've lost faith in me.

Record yourself on video and watch it. It's not going to be comfortable, but you're not going to fire yourself. You know, You're not going to kick yourself out of the house unless it's like that bad and then send it to someone who's honest with you and supportive at the same time, and I'll tell you how they really feel. And you know, see, I see. If you get that response consistently and work on that daily, like make a

video every single day to post on social media. Even if you don't post it, make a social media video, you'll get better.

a group. So if you've nailed everything but you can't read the room or at least have an insight into you're in trouble. So talk to me about reading the room. And as you said, we'll get it wrong at times, but with for me, one minute on building rapport, creating connection, understanding what's going in front of you, and being able to adapt to what is happening in the room.

read that with the same way. When you first fall in love with somebody and you are so into them that you start to finish each other's sentences, you almost know what they're feeling because you are matching and mirroring them subconsciously, and you are sending the same messages to your brain that they are sending to theirs. So if you're having trouble reading the room, I guarantee you you're thinking about how am I coming off? Am I precise?

Did that bullet the third bullet on the four slide land?

you emotionally provocative in a good way? And do you have a cohesive narrative that allows them to touch upon something that is relevant, like a basic human need they want to fulfill an aspiration that they want to grow into. If you're not doing that stuff, you're gonna have a hard time reading the people in front of you.

I presented that was me. It's like I knew quite a bit about a small area and then but because I could get away with a bit of charisma and charm and bullshit and storytelling, I got away with it. But it caught up with me because I literally when I was about thirty, I recognized I need to know more stuff. I don't know enough stuff, right, so tell me about let's put preparation and content just I don't know what you want to say about that, but off you go.

four hours a day, not seven days a week. I mean, take a day off, but it's something you do every single day. If you are cramming for a presentation, that presentation is gonna be pretty contrived. I think most of the preparation that you do it's a matter of proximity. The closer you get to the presentation. I'm talking about like a day and hours before. The more preparation should have to do with mindset and what's going on with

you emotionally in presence. The further you get from that presentation, the more it should be about the content. You need to know three to five levels deeper in your subject matter expertise than your audience. Otherwise you're gonna come across as counterfeit. You're gonna be anxious and for good reason. And there's a level there's a level of dishonesty because you're presenting yourself as a subject matter expert. So the short answer is prepare around content like research, all of

those things. Subject matter expertise further away. The closer you get, the more you shift that towards stage presence.

a subject matter expert. Come in and know the ten points that you want to hit, know your examples, no how to, but you got to be able to take information and questions from the room and change course and then bring it back. That's teaching. And we just constantly butted heads on this. So one day he goes to give his presentation and the projector's not working and the slides were not delivered, so he doesn't have any slides

and neither does anyone in the room. Well let's just say that was a horrible day for him because they had to pull him out of there. He could think about this, This guy was a professor, then went into a commercial enterprise. Standing in front of room decades of experience could not present. Yeah, that's what that's what happens.

I'm like, oh my god. And I was excited to have this person. And it was also a bit of a feather in the typ cap to get this person and go, hey, guess who's on and Melissa and I waxed and waned over. I'm like, we listened to it, right, I can't. This is terrible. People will hate this. Yeah, So it's funny you said that because I wrote down my last point was death by PowerPoint was So it's hilarious that you do that. It's like the antithesis of connection.

And rapport and you know, instinctiveness and intuition in real time.

But I'm not against power point. But power point is so overused and depended upon, especially when you work in industries where they consider not having a detailed slide by slide PowerPoint to be unprofessional. I think the inability to get in front of a room and teach them something and take them on a journey somewhere without a like pink by numbers, bullet by bullet approach to doing so, I believe that's somewhat unprofessional. But it's kind of kind of hot.

tell the room you're fucking amazing. You get up. What do you do in the first minute, Like, what is the first minute about? What's your intention? What's your focus? What's your objective in the first minute.

What I don't open with because I think that's equally important is well today, our goal for this session is our objectives are again like PowerPoint based, not saying I'm not going to get there, but I'm going to captivate the room with the story. So the first thing I open with if it's not a question. If it's not an antidote, it'll most likely be a story for me. And I'm not saying that works for everybody. Then once

you do that, you capture attention and they're with you. Ben, you can go over, Okay, here's our objectives for today. And then it's connected to the story you just told.