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Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 131 – Nick Morgan
Professional speeches need more than pithy analogies and funny anecdotes. A good speaker must provide actionable takeaways or they won’t be taken seriously. So, how do you find a balance between information and entertainment?
Our guest is Nick Morgan, the world-renowned founder of Public Words, a company that helps clients create content that engages, persuades, and moves people to action. He’s also the author of “Can You Hear Me?” and “Power Cues.”
Nick fills our episode with amazing advice about careers in speaking, and talks about going from entertainment to impactful within the same keynote. He offers tips for engaging and forging a real connection with an audience, and why your personal story could be key.
If you need a strategy to bring your thought leadership to market, Thought Leadership Leverage can assist you! Contact us for more information. In addition, we can help you implement marketing, research, and sales. Let us help you so you can devote yourself to what you do best.
Transcript
Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, this is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast today which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m really excited to talk to our guest today. He is pretty much a legend in the field of speaking and communications on the corporate side. So give you just a highlight of Nick’s bio because it’s pretty impressive. So Dr. Nick Morgan is one of America’s top 100 communication speakers, theorist and coach. He’s been commissioned by Fortune 50 companies to write for many CEOs and presidents. He’s coached people to give congressional testimony, to appear in the media, and to deliver unforgettable TED Talks. Also a world renowned author, and he’s got five books or so under his belt. His latest book came out in 2018, published by Harvard, called Can You Hear Me? And he’s earned a PhD in literature and rhetoric, and anybody that has been in the speaking space for any period of time knows of Nick. So it’s an honor to have you on today, Nick. Thanks for joining us.
Nick Morgan Oh, Peter, it’s a great pleasure to be with you.
Peter Winick Great, all right, so let’s just sort of dive right in. It seems that the business world of speaking has changed a lot in the last several years, right? Moving from being very speaker bureau centric to not as speaker bureau-centric. They’re still important, but they’re not sort of the top of the game. And then it seems like everybody I meet everywhere is calling themselves a speaker. So, you know, there’s a lot of competition, if you will, and a lot people diving into this world, thinking, oh, that’s really easy to do, So I can just. people tell me I can speak, so I’ll just do that. So can you talk through that to start? And I’ve got a list of lots of questions for you, but tell me a little bit about how the business side of speaking has changed in the last several years.
Nick Morgan Yeah, absolutely. I think the change accelerated after the 2008 meltdown, because we had a period of a couple of years there where certain kinds of public speaking vanished from, from the earth, just about motivational speaking, for example. And as a result that when it started to come back, everybody was all focused. All the meeting planners and, and, bureau folks were focused on takeaways. So, nowadays, speeches… have to have takeaways or you can’t take them seriously. And so everybody’s learned that. And the other thing that happened was people saw the speaking game looked like a great opportunity. And so we’ve got lots more competition than we had even two or three years ago. Sure. And I think the bar is getting raised in several ways beyond that. For example, Ted has created this enormous pressure, Ted and Ted X created this an enormous pressure. as you say, for everybody to become a speaker, anybody with an idea to become a speaker. They look at Ted and they think, I can do that. And they tend to go one of two ways. Either they’re very heavy on the information or they’re light on the information, but they’re very heavy and entertainment. And so we have we have more speakers now who are great entertainers, who are very funny, who… measure the success of their speeches by literally the number of last-per-minute, which is a measure they use for Saturday Night Live and for stand-up comics. Interesting that it gets applied in business speaking world. That, to me, is really an extraordinary development. And then, of course, on the other side, the focus and the emphasis is on new ideas and things that will change your life instantly, you the audience, without having to do any bit of work at all while you have to listen for 25 minutes. Yeah, and you’re a winner today. You just learned how to make your life easier, safer, and more fun, and have rock hard abs. Yep. with three takeaways and the pressure on speakers I think is really getting intense in both those areas.
Peter Winick Sure. Well, let me add another pressure that you touched on really, really briefly, but I think it’s critical, is there’s the ego side to this where many speakers have their standard keynote, and it’s an hour, an hour and 15 or whatever, and they get booked and they get their full fee. And then the event coordinator says, oh, yeah, yeah. But we’re doing things a little bit differently here. We’ve got to get that down to 20 minutes. And they have the full panic moment because, you know, if you’ve got all your stuff time to the beat. You know, when you get the chuckle and when you get this and they tell you sort of two, three days before, can you cut out, you know, 70% of the fluff? How did you know that’s another pressure given to me shorter, right? So what do you do in that world, right. So that’s the world that we’re living in today. It’s probably not going to go back to something different, right, because you’ve got these social media stars getting out there. I want to unpack some of the things you said one at a time. So that motivational piece that you said it used to be, and again, not all that long ago. sufficient for a certain caliber or a certain style of speaker to just be motivational. Just get up there being charismatic and at the end, you’ll learn the new hand signal and a new way to say woo woo or yahoo or whatever. And everybody walked out of there feeling good. And then really the organizers realized like that was really like a sugar high, right? I just whiffed down a snicker and I feel good for five minutes. Not a good investment, right? So how do you move from charismatic and motivational, which are not bad things and then over themselves. to takeaways, right? That’s not a bridge that many folks can make. So how would you recommend folks start thinking about moving from sort of that entertainment side of it to impact focus?
Nick Morgan Yeah, I think it’s a great question. I think, it’s easier to move the other way. I think they’re both difficult, but I think it is easier if you’re a thought leader as a fairly serious speech to lighten it up and add a lot of pep and charisma and work on that aspect of your game and make it more fun and entertaining. It may cause you a few gray hairs if you feel like you’re letting go of your seriousness or you really are passionately dedicated to the topic. But I think that can be done. and going the other way is harder. I’ve worked with motivational speakers, and I won’t name them, who, when we unpacked the speech with that objective, because they had been told, precisely to your question, they had been said they had to come away, they had some takeaways, we unpack the speech and we found there was no substance, I mean.
Peter Winick And you won’t name one of those just for fun? No, I won’t
Nick Morgan No, I won’t name one of those, that would be wrong, but it’s surprisingly hard to put in content and I sometimes find myself writing the speech for the person and thinking this is really Nick talking, not the motivational speaker. Ultimately, what you have to do there is, and let me give you a more serious and nuanced answer to it. You have to dig down deep into the story that the person is telling because your story is always unique. Only you can tell your story in your own voice. And in there, there is some, there’s going to be some serious life lessons and they may not be exactly what. speaker bureaus and meeting planners are looking for, but they are in there if you dive deep into your story. And the paradoxical thing is that those kind of speakers, the motivational speakers especially, they typically have some achievement, TV news anchor or they’re a surfer or they are a…
Peter Winick athlete or a military hero, they’ve done a great job. Often athletes, yeah.
Nick Morgan And they think they’re hired because of their success. But I always tell people, and they have a hard time grasping this, but it’s a great breakthrough for them if they can. I always telling them your success is the least interesting part of it.
Peter Winick Yeah.
Nick Morgan It’s what got you to that success that’s interesting. What was the hurdle you had to get over that allowed you to become? And everybody always has a story and that’s when it starts to get interesting and it’s how you break through those barriers that everybody’s run across. Nobody gets out of this world unscathed and everybody’s got a story. So it’s digging into that story and often that’s very uncomfortable for people because they’re focused on their success and yet the that stories come out of failure.
Peter Winick Well, and there seems to be, I don’t want to call it a trend, but for lack of a better word, we’ll throw that out there now, for authenticity, for vulnerability, for getting yourself out there and not being the astronaut where I was the first one to walk on the moon and that was your story and people are in awe of that. And I think that’s a bad thing, that’s an amazing thing. But really about, do you think about the Brene Browns or plenty of others in of that genre where it’s just getting yourself out there really raw. and almost some of your worst, horrible moments. And people lean into that because more people have had horrible, awful, vulnerable, uncomfortable experiences than have walked on the moon.
Nick Morgan Exactly, there are only 12 who have walked on the moon, right, or 12.
Peter Winick Right, right, right.
Nick Morgan By definition, all the rest of us fit into that other category. So that’s absolutely right. And you mentioned Brene Brown. I mean, she is the avatar of that. Her TED Talk got, what, 17 million views or something. And her career was launched on that. And the bad news is you can’t launch a career on TED anymore because it’s oversaturated. It’s a victim of its own success. But in Brene brown’s day, when she first started out, she could. And you’re right. that authenticity, that rawness, that the… nervousness she confessed to and all the other issues, that’s what made her and that’s what people crave.
Peter Winick And that takes, by the way, incredible courage. Not that it’s not admirable to say, I can run the mile on this speed or I’ve hiked Mount Everest or whatever. Those are amazing things. But the courage that it takes to really put yourself out there is a different type of courage that not everybody has. That’s right. So let me add, you have an interesting vantage point given that you’ve got your relationship. with Harvard, the books, working with world-class folks. So you’re really at the center of this. What do you see sort of coming down the pipe in terms of things people should be thinking about doing more of, and what are the things that are sort of old tried and trues that are no longer tried and true?
Nick Morgan Yeah, good question. Tried and True is three anecdotes and a couple of examples, and you’re done putting together a speech with your three or five or six best stories and charming anecdotes about aspects of your life. I’m thinking now, because you got me started on this, about motivational speakers, people who are celebrities or do something. And for a long time, that used to be enough. and it’s not anymore. So I think it’s gonna be harder and harder for speakers who don’t have both. That is, they don’t some actual thought leadership to step into your world there and mine, if they don’ have some actual thought leadership and if they also aren’t entertaining. And that sets a very high bar, but I think that’s the trend. The other interesting, trend is when you think about speakers like, say, Daniel Pink, who began as a speechwriter for Al Gore, I think, if I remember correctly. And then he went into journalism. And Dan wasn’t really, he didn’t specialize in anything until after a while he’d written several books. He kind of looked back and said, oh, I’m an expert on kind of humans in the workplace and the psychology of that. Um, and, and so his expertise developed, if you will, over a period of time. Um, And he kind of found his niche nowadays. People have to start at their niche and go there instantly and, and kill the niche and then grow out from there. Um, if, if try to go the other way, uh, you’re, you are doomed because there’s just too much competition. But if you can show up and be the only left-handed expert on, on yak milk. in the middle Victorian period for China and Mongolia, then you’ve got a niche. You can defend that niche. you can be an expert in that niche, and that’s the place to start. As you develop contacts and as you develop your game and as your develop your business, then you can broaden out from there. But you’ve gotta start with that niche now, and I think that’s a huge difference that we used to do, but much more general topics.
Peter Winick I would agree with that because when I’m working with clients and I say, tell me a little bit about yourself and the work and they get into a little business and then I’ll say, well, who could benefit from this? Who do you see as the folks that you can impact the most with your work, whether that’s a speaker, a book, whatever the case. Oh, this would be great for everybody. My answer is typically, okay, unless you’ve got the budget of Coca-Cola or Procter and Gamble, you can’t afford to be all things to all people. So let’s get that down to, I think somebody just registered left-handed, you know. yeah that’s my thing but you have to get it down to that level and i agree and then build it a little bit further i think the other thing today is you know you’ve got to you’ve gotta have the sensors in place to listen really loudly and quickly to the market and it’ll tell you where you want to go and what’s working because oftentimes i see authors and speakers are worst judge of what their best stuff is. Their throwaway line is actually what the market loves and the thing they’ve spent their life researching nobody cares about. And if you’re not open-minded on that, you don’t want to be stubborn. You want to successful.
Nick Morgan That’s a great point and it’s hard to listen. You fall in love with your own material and it is hard to change that based on the audience feedback. Another piece I’d add to that, and this one mystifies me, frankly, I’ve been preaching audience interaction in speaking ever since I started in the business. And when I get people to do it, inevitably their careers take off. And yet… majority of speakers don’t do much audience interaction. They get out there. I mean, and I understand why. It’s much more controllable. You can learn your stuff. You get out there, you do your 45 minutes and you’re done and off you go. It saves wear and tear. It is messy to get into the audience and to take their questions in a real way. But to me, That’s inevitably what drives ratings and response and people are let’s talk about the typical business audience that you might be speaking to or organizational audience. Those people are not paid to be passive in their day jobs. And so if you ask them to sit there for an hour, if you’re really good and really entertaining and you’ve got some things to say, great, they’ll enjoy that hour. But if you get them doing their thing that is acting in some way, responding, doing something interactive with the speaker, then they’ll remember that talk forever if you do it right.
Peter Winick So what are the things, what are some specifics or tactical things one could do to transition from sort of monolog mode to dialog mode as a keynoter, because at some level that’s counterintuitive. They, hey, listen, they’re paying me the big bucks. They want to hear my story. They want hear my accomplishments, whatever. And you don’t want to, you know, boil that down to, and the last 10 minutes we’ll do a Q&A and then, you, know, someone’s running around the audience with a microphone and it’s awkward and quiet and silent. How do you do that and do that well?
Nick Morgan Yeah, so first of all, you have to rethink the shape of your speech. And you raise the first point, which is very basic and important, which is don’t wait till the end because you’ve set up a dynamic where you do the talking, the audience does the sitting and listening. And so by the end, if they’re still awake, it’s no wonder. It’s no matter for them that they’re going to be kind of quiet when you say, OK, I’m done now. Any questions over to you?
Peter Winick Yon Yon, right?
Nick Morgan I always say break the talk up into 20 minute chunks. There’s a reason why Ted’s 20 minutes. It’s the average attention span, although there’s some evidence that the attention spans are getting shorter. That’s a topic for another day that we could debate quite a while. But in any case, 20 minutes is plenty long enough. And so do your audience interaction then. But there, and I blog about this all the time because it’s something I’m so passionate about. There are lots of ways to get audiences interactive. And one of the things that happens as you start developing those muscles is you learn how to channel and control audience interaction so that the audience feels like it’s doing its thing and it feels great and empowered and wonderful. But it also does it within parameters. And so you don’t completely lose control of the talk and you can still finish on time and you still get your important points done. But one of first things, one of best things to do, I always say is Start with the question, what do you want the audience to do differently as a result of having heard your talk?
Peter Winick I love that. Yep.
Nick Morgan What do you want the audience to do differently? And so once you know the answer to that question, well, I want them to do X, then ask yourself, is there some way I could get them started doing that during the talk?
Peter Winick Right, so a short little taste of the experiment.
Nick Morgan It’s a baby step and a first way of thinking about it, changing their perspective. So I mean, there are lots and lots of ways to do that. But the first thing is to ask that question, what do I want them to do differently? And then how can I get that going in the talk itself? Another one is to asked yourself, so what are the stories the audience could tell me that are relevant to my topic. And that would be in effect, useful research for me. And if you think that way, then it doesn’t seem so tragic to turn over five of your 40 minutes over, over to the audience because you’re learning something from them. So it’s, it’s a changing your mindset from thinking of yourself as the great provider, I’m the one who’s going to, going to add value in this to thinking. Okay. So what can the audience, what stories do the audience have buried in them somewhere that they can tell me?
Peter Winick How can I pull it out?
Nick Morgan I just give you a quick example. I started speaking my next to last book power cues. I start that with a story about how I’d fractured my skull as a teenager. And when I am gone into a coma, when I woke up, I could no longer read body language in the average way that everybody could. And so I had to relearn it. Wow. Yeah, I had lost the ability and it’s particularly entertaining if you’re 17 years old, because everything your friends say. is either sarcastic or meant to be funny. And so, of course, it’s opposite to the actual words. So when I went back to school, my friend said, Nick, you look great. And I said, thank you, because I thought they were straightforward.
Peter Winick You became Nick the Literal.
Nick Morgan Yeah, right. I missed the cues. I couldn’t understand the lift of the eyebrow or the curl of the lip or whatever. And it took me a year to relearn it. But anyway, when I first told that story to an audience, it was actually very hard for me to tell because it had been a very personal thing. And I had experienced as a kind of loss and shame and something I did with difficulty had to relean. Well, when i finished giving that speech the very first time I was talking to IBM, to a bunch of scientists at IBM. And this gigantic guy came up to me at the end of the talk. I’m 6’1″, but he easily towered over me. So I must have been 6’6″, 6’7″, something like that. And he had a big gray beard and flyaway gray hair. I mean, he looked like the wild man on the mountain. And he came charging toward me with his arms outstretched. I thought, is this guy going to kill me? Did I really piss him off or something? What’s going on here? Instead, he gave me this hug. He lifted me off the ground. Tears were running down his cheeks. And he said, my son is autistic. And you’ve just given me insight into what it must be like to be autistic. They can’t decode what people mean by what they’re saying. And it was a huge revelation to me. It had never occurred to me that could be relevant. And so we can learn from our audience if we open up and allow that.
Peter Winick That’s fantastic. So as we start to wind down here, I think you and I could probably chat for hours on this, but spend a moment or two talking to a big chunk of our audience out there, which are folks that are early in their keynoting career. So they’ve got accomplished careers elsewhere or accomplishments elsewhere. And now they’re sort of spending some time here or committing to spend more time there. maybe they sold the business, whatever the case may be. What are the things that they should be considering, thinking and trying out as they sort of go down that, that start their journey into speaker world and thought leader world and all that.
Nick Morgan Yeah, I would say there are three things they need to do to have a successful, sustained, sustained professional speaking career.
Peter Winick Wait, wait, is that because of the rule of three things that you said there’s three things? Because that’s another sub-question.
Nick Morgan There are always three things.
Peter Winick Okay, yes.
Nick Morgan Although in speeches, five works better in speeches because it sounds more complicated. So it sounds like you’re more of a subject matter expert. Seven is really awesome.
Peter Winick Well, seven is like in PhD, right? Yeah. Okay, but give us the three.
Nick Morgan We’ll only do three here because you could actually remember three, so that would empower your listeners instead of making them need to call me. The first one is, of course, you’ve got to work your chops. You’ve got develop a killer speech, and that work is never done. You can always get better, and you should become a person who always studies what other speakers are doing, and this is a great time and place to do it because we’ve the presidential 2020 presidential campaign cranking up here in the U.S. And so we’ve got daily examples of rhetoric and speech making, and it’s just awesome for a sure speaker to always be on the lookout for ways to get better. Watch people and say, what do I like about that? What do I not like about? What did that person do to succeed? How did that personal misfire? And it’s not that you want to imitate those people, it’s that you wanna take the lessons and apply them to your own style. And it is about finding your own voice. So that’s the first one, killer speech. The second one Um, is don’t think of what you’re doing on the web as, as branding and marketing and advertising, although it is all those things, think of it instead as starting a conversation with the people out there and you’ve got to find, we talked earlier about the niche, you’ve gotta start with that niche because those are the people are going to be most passionate who care about, um, the yak butter in the same way.
Peter Winick You too.
Nick Morgan and they’re going to converse with you, they’re gonna find you somewhere on the web in the huge millions and millions of websites, the huge welter websites out there. They’re gonna find you, start talking with you. Then you got to figure out how to broaden the conversation from there. But think of what you’re doing on social media and on the Web and in the digital world as a conversation. And how can I get that dialog going? Think of it as open that You should always not, you got to push information out there, sure. And you’ve got to talk yourself up and all that. But think of it as how can I get a conversation going? And then the third one is how can I continue to establish my expertise? It may be writing a book. It may it may be doing YouTube videos. Who knows? There are lots and lots of ways to do it these days. But you’ve gotta establish your expertise. And one of the funny things about the keynote speaking world these days is that the book was declared dead a few years back when hybrid publishing started become. popular and people said, yeah, so the book is, it takes too long. It’s become pointless. It’s too difficult. I think the result is now that in time, in the next few years, books will become even more important as a way of establishing expertise. That doesn’t mean they’re going to be any easier or less frustrating to do. And they’re very hard to sell these days unless the word Trump happens to be in title.
Peter Winick But, uh…
Nick Morgan But I think books are still very much an important part of the mix. You can do other things as well, let me hasten to say, but I do think a book is a marker for the use in the keynote speaking.
Peter Winick But don’t, but I would also say on the, on the book piece, there’s so much sort of fluff and crap out there. Don’t rush to do a book just to say you haven’t, you’ve done a book, put the effort and the energy, the market is too smart now that if you’re going to put something out there, it better be readable or it needs to be insightful. It needs to be researched. But I mean, it needs be a good book. We don’t need another crappy book on the digital shelves of the universe. Well, this has been awesome, Nick. I can’t Thank you enough. And if you’re out there and You’re serious about your speaking and you’re an existing, you know, well-known speaker. You’re early in the game. You’re somewhere in the middle. You need a refresh. Nick is the guy. And I know many, many of my clients and those that I admire very much that have worked with him and had amazing outcomes. And I would encourage you to consider working with Nick if that’s something that’s on your radar. So thank you so much today.
To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter at thought leadership leverage.com and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.
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